THOMAS BAILEY ALDRit 



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COPVRIGHT DEPOSIT 



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WORKS. Riverside Edition. With two Portraits. 
Poetical Works, 2 vols., $3.00. Prose Works, 6 
vols., J9.00. The set, 8 vols., i2mo, $12.00. 

I., II. Poems. 

III. Marjorie Daw and Other Stories. 

IV. Prudence Palfrey, and A Rivermouth 

Romance. 
V. The Queen of Sheba, and Other Stories. 
VI. The Stillwater Tragedy. 
VII. The Story of a Bad Boy, and The Little 
Violinist, with Other Sketches. 
VIII. From Ponkapog to Pesth, and An Old 
Town by the Sea. 

PONKAPOG PAPERS. Narrow i2mo, $1.00 «^/. Post- 
age extra. 

A SEA TURN AND OTHER MATTERS. Short Stories. 
i2mo, $1.25. 

POEMS. Household Edition. With Portrait and Illus- 
trations. Crown 8vo, $1.50. 

For the nttmerous single-vclwne editions of Mr. A l- 
drick's writings, see Catalogue. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 

Boston and New York. 



PONKAPOG 
PAPERS 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 





BOSTON 

AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

MDCCCCIII 



THE LIBRARY O.- 

CONGRESS, 
Tvi^ CoPicB REceivEO 

i)<n :j 1903 

CopvwwMT wrw 
OLASS ^ XXoi No. 



-' COPY a 



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■n 



COPYRIGHT 1903 BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October iqo3 



« 



TO 
FRANCIS BARTLETT 



'TPHESE miscellaneous notes and 
essays are called Ponkapog Papers 
not simply because they chanced, for 
the most part, to be written within the 
limits of the old Indian Reservation, 
but, rather, because there is something 
typical of their unpretentiousness in the 
modesty with which Ponkapog assumes 
to being even a village. The little 
Massachusetts settlement, nestled under 
the wing of the Blue Hills, has no illu- 
sions concerning itself, never mistakes 
the cackle of the bourg for the sound 
that echoes round the world, and no 
more thinks of rivalling great centres of 
human activity than these slight papers 
vii 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

dream of inviting comparison between 
themselves and important pieces of 
literature. Therefore there seems some- 
thing especially appropriate in the geo- 
graphical title selected, and if the au- 
thor's choice of name need further 
excuse, it is to be found in the alluring 
alliteration lying ready at his hand. 

Redman Farm, Ponkapog^ 
1903. 



CONTENTS 

LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK I 

ASIDES 55 

TOM FOLIO 57 

FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES 69 

A NOTE ON '* L'AIGLON " 73 

PLOT AND CHARACTER 79 

THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE 82 

LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL 88 

DECORATION DAY 94 

WRITERS AND TALKERS 98 

ON EARLY RISING lOI 

UN POETE MANqUE I07 

THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD 112 



CONTENTS 

ASIDES CONTINUED 

ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION Il8 

WISHMAKERS' TOWN 1 23 

HISTORICAL NOVELS I29 

POOR YORICK 133 

THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER I40 

ROBERT HERRICK 151 



LEAVES 

FROM 

A NOTE BOOK 



LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK 



TN his Memoirs, Kropotkin states the singular 
-*- fact that the natives of the Malayan Archipel- 
ago have an idea that something is extracted from 
them v^hen their likenesses are taken by photo- 
graphy. Here is the motive for a fantastic short 
story, in which the hero — an author in vogue 
or a popular actor — might be depicted as having 
all his good qualities gradually photographed 
out of him. This could well be the result of 
too prolonged indulgence in the effort to ' ' look 
natural." First the man loses his charming sim- 
plicity ; then he begins to pose in intellectual 
attitudes, with finger on brow ; then he becomes 
morbidly self-conscious, and finally ends in an 
asylum for incurable egotists. His death might 
be brought about by a cold caught in going out 

3 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

bareheaded, there being, for the moment, no hat 
in the market of sufficient circumference to meet 
his enlarged requirement. 

The evening we dropped anchor in the Bay 
of Yedo the moon was hanging directly over 
Yokohama. It was a mother-of-pearl moon, 
and might have been manufactured by any of 
the delicate artisans in the Hanchodori quarter. 
It impressed one as being a very good imitation, 
but nothing more. Nammikawa, the cloisonne- 
worker at Tokio, could have made a better 
moon. 

I NOTICE the announcement of a new edition 
of " The Two First Centuries of Florentine 
Literature," by Professor Pasquale Villari. I 
am not acquainted with the work in question, 
but I trust that Professor Villari makes it plain 
to the reader how both centuries happened to be 
first. 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

» 
The walking delegates of a higher civiliza- 
tion, who have nothing to divide, look upon the 
notion of property as a purely artificial creation 
of human society. According to these advanced 
philosophers, the time will come when no man 
shall be allowed to call anything his. The bene- 
ficent law which takes away an author's rights 
in his own books just at the period when old 
age is creeping upon him seems to me a hand- 
some stride toward the longed-for millennium. 

Save us from our friends — our enemies we 
can guard against. The well-meaning rector of 
the little parish of Woodgates, England, and 
several of Robert Browning's local admirers 
have recently busied themselves In erecting a 
tablet to the memory of '' the first known fore- 
father of the poet." This lately turned up an- 
cestor, who does not date very far back, was also 
named Robert Browning, and is described on 
the mural marble as " formerly footman and 
5 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

butler to Sir John Bankes of Corfe Castle." 
Now, Robert Browning the poet had as good 
right as Abou Ben Adhem himself to ask to be 
placed on the list of those who love their fellow 
men ; but if the poet could have been consulted 
in the matter he probably would have preferred 
not to have that particular footman exhumed. 
How^ever, it is an ill wind that blow^s nobody 
good. Sir John Bankes would scarcely have 
been heard of in our young century if it had 
not been for his footman. As Robert stood day 
by day, sleek and solemn, behind his master's 
chair in Corfe Castle, how little it entered into 
the head of Sir John that his highly respectable 
name would be served up to posterit}' — like a 
cold relish — by his own butler ! By Robert ! 

Ix the east-side slums of New York, some- 
where in the picturesque Bowery district, 
stretches a malodorous little street w^holly 
given over to long-bearded, bird -beaked mer- 
chants of ready-made and second-hand clothing. 
6 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

The contents of the dingy shops seem to have 
revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and 
taken possession of the sidewalk. One could 
fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this 
point, and that those ghastly row^s of complete 
suits strung up on either side of the doorw^ays 
were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. 
But as you approach these limp figures, each 
dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most 
suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the 
lapel of a coat here and there, a strip of paper 
announcing the very low price at which you 
may become the happy possessor. That dis- 
sipates the illusion. 

PoLONius, in the play, gets killed — and not 
any too soon. If it only were practicable to kill 
him in real life ! A story — to be called The 
Passing of Polonius — in which a king issues a 
decree condemning to death every long-winded, 
didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of 
rank, and is himself instantly arrested and de- 

7 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

capitated. The man who suspects his own 
tediousness is yet to be born. 

Whenever I take up Emerson's poems I find 
myself turning automatically to his Bacchus. 
Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in 
mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights 
not reached by any other of our poets ; but 
Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its tex- 
ture can bear comparison with the world's best 
in this kind. In imaginative quality and austere 
richness of diction what other verse of our 
period approaches it? The day Emerson wrote 
Bacchus he had in him, as Michael Drayton said 
of Marlowe, " those brave translunary things 
that the first poets had." 

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of 
the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this 
man in some vast city, New York or London. 
Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his 



8 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring 
at the door-bell ! 

No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an 
honest portrait of himself in an autobiography, 
however sedulously he may have set to vs^ork 
about it. In spite of his candid purpose he 
omits necessary touches and adds superfluous 
ones. At times he cannot help draping his 
thought, and the least shred of drapery becomes 
a disguise. It is only the diarist who accom- 
plishes the feat of self -portraiture, and he, with- 
out any such end in view, does it unconsciously. 
A man cannot keep a daily record of his com- 
ings and goings and the little items that make 
up the sum of his life, and not inadvertently 
betray himself at every turn. He lays bare his 
heart with a candor not possible to the self- 
consciousness that inevitably colors premeditated 
revelation. While Pepys was filling those small 
octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he 
never once suspected that he was adding a pho- 
9 - 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

tographic portrait of himself to the world's gal- 
lery of immortals. We are more intimately 
acquainted with Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner 
man — his little meannesses and his large gener- 
osities — than we are with half the persons we 
call our dear friends. 

The young girl in my story is to be as sensitive 
to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever any- 
body praises her she breaks into colors. 

In the process of dusting my study, the other 
morning, the maid replaced an engraving of 
Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the man- 
tel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that 
undignified posture ever since. I have no dis- 
position to come to his aid. My abhorrence of 
the wretch is as hearty as if he had not been 
dead and — otherwise provided for these last 
three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England 
was nearly as merciless, but she was sincere and 
uncompromising in her extirpation of heretics. 

lO 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was 
occasioned by the news of the St. Bartholomew 
massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it 
for the time being, when it seemed politic to do 
so. Queen Mary was a maniac ; but the suc- 
cessor of Torquemada was the incarnation of 
cruelty pure and simple, and I have a mind to 
let my counterfeit presentment of him stand on 
its head for the rest of its natural life. I cor- 
dially dislike several persons, but I hate no- 
body, living or dead, excepting Philip II. of 
Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble 
as Charles I. gave the amiable Mr. Dick. 

Among the delightful men and women whom 
you are certain to meet at an English country 
house there is generally one guest who is sup- 
posed to be preternaturally clever and amusing 
— "so very droll, don't you know." He recites 
things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and 
mimics public characters. He is a type of a 
class, and I take him to be one of the elemen- 
II 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

tary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. 
His presence is capable of adding a gloom to 
an undertaker's establishment. The last time I 
fell in with him was on a coaching trip through 
Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must 
confess to receiving an instant of entertainment 
at his hands. He was delivering a little dis- 
sertation on " the English and American lan- 
guages." As there were two Americans on the 
back seat — it seems we term ourselves ' ' Amur- 
ricans " — his choice of subject was full of tact. 
It was exhilarating to get a lesson in pronuncia- 
tion from a gentleman who said boult for bolt, 
called St. John Sin' Jun^ and did not know 
how to pronounce the beautiful name of his 
own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober 
man saying Maudlin for Magdalen ! Perhaps 
the purest English spoken is that of the English 
folk who have resided abroad ever since the 
Elizabethan period, or thereabouts. 



12 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

Every one has a bookplate these days, and the 
collectors are after it. The fool and his book- 
plate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex- 
lihris is inanely to destroy the only significance 
it has, that of indicating the past or present 
ownership of the volume in which it is placed. 

When an Englishman is not highly imaginative 
he is apt to be the most matter-of-fact of mortals. 
He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has an alert 
sense of humor. Yet England has produced 
the finest of humorists and the greatest of 
poets. The humor and imagination which 
are diffused through other peoples concentrate 
themselves from time to time in individual 
Englishmen. 

This is a page of autobiography, though not 
written in the first person : Many years ago a 
noted Boston publisher used to keep a large 
memorandum-book on a table in his personal 
13 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

office. The volume always lay open, and was in 
no manner a private affair, being the receptacle 
of nothing more important than hastily scrawled 
reminders to attend to this thing or the other. It 
chanced one day that a very young, unfledged 
author, passing through the city, looked in upon 
the publisher, who was also the editor of a 
famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy 
of verses secreted about his person. The pub- 
lisher was absent, and young Milton, feeling 
that '' they also serve who only stand and wait," 
sat down and waited. Presently his eye fell 
upon the memorandum -book, lying there spread 
out like a morning newspaper, and almost in 
spite of himself he read : " Don't forget to see 

the binder," " Don't forget to mail E his 

contract," '^ Don't forget H 's proofs," etc. 

An inspiration seized upon the youth ; he took 
a pencil, and at the tail of this long list of 
" don't forgets " he wrote : " Don't forget to 

accept A 's poem." He left his manuscript 

on the table and disappeared. That afternoon 
H 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

when the publisher glanced over his memo- 
randa, he was not a little astonished at the last 
item ; but his sense of humor was so strong that 
he did accept the poem (it required a strong 
sense of humor to do that), and sent the lad a 
check for it, though the verses remain to this 
day unprinted. That kindly publisher was wise 
as well as kind. 

French novels with metaphysical or psycholo- 
gical prefaces are always certain to be particu- 
larly indecent. 

I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry 
Sandford of England, the priggish little boy 
in the story of '* Sandford and Merton," has a 
worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, 
who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly end- 
less succession of girls' books. I came across 
a nest of fifteen of them the other day. This 
impossible female is carried from infancy up to 
grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still lei- 

15 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

surely pursuing her way down to the tomb in an 
ecstatic state of uninterrupted didacticism. There 
are twenty-five volumes of her and the grand- 
daughter, who is also christened Elsie, and is her 
grandmother's own child, with the same preco- 
cious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to 
her elders. An interesting instance of hereditary 
talent ! 

H 's intellect resembles a bamboo — slender, 

graceful, and hollow. Personally, he is long and 
narrow, and looks as if he might have been 
the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put 
together, like an ill-constructed sentence, and 
affects me like one. His figure is ungrammatical. 

American humor is nearly as ephemeral as 
the flowers that bloom in the spring. Each gen- 
eration has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on 
cultivating a new kind. That of i860, if it were 
to break into blossom at the present moment, 
would probably be left to fade upon the stem. 
16 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing 
hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety 
is especially subject to very early frosts, as is 
also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor 
is not to be classed with the fragile plants ; it 
has a serious root striking deep down into 
rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering 
indefinitely. 

I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical Journal, 
whose plan should involve the discharge of the 
chief literary critic and the installment of a fresh 
censor on the completion of each issue. To 
place a man in permanent absolute control of a 
certain number of pages, in which to express his 
opinions, is to place him in a position of great 
personal danger. It is almost inevitable that he 
should come to overrate the importance of those 
opinions, to take himself with far too much 
seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of 
his own infallibility. The liberty to summon 
this or that man-of -letters to a supposititious 
17 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-ap- 
pointed judge an exaggerated sense of superi- 
ority. He becomes impatient of any rulings not 
his, and says in effect, if not in so many words : 
" I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let 
no dog bark." When the critic reaches this 
exalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is 
gone. 

After a debauch of thunder - shower, the 
weather takes the pledge and signs it with a 
rainbow. 

I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told 
in full. When every detail is given, the mind 
rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the 
desire to use its own wings. The partly draped 
statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who 
would have those marble folds slip from the 
raised knee of the Venus of Melos ? Hawthorne 
knew how to make his lovely thought lovelier 
by sometimes half veiling it. 
i8 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

* 

I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a 
slight fancy which Herrick has handled twice 
in the " Hesperides." The fancy, however, is 
not Herrick's ; it is as old as poetry and the ex- 
aggeration of lovers, and I have the same privi- 
lege as another to try my fortune with it : 

UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE 

Chaucer 

When some hand has partly drawn 

The cloudy curtains of her bed, 

And my lady's golden head 
Glimmers in the dusk like dawn, 
Then methinks is day begun. 
Later, when her dream has ceased 

And she softly stirs and wakes, 
Then it is as when the East 

A sudden rosy magic takes 
From the cloud-enfolded sun, 

And full day breaks ! 

Shakespeare, who has done so much to discour- 
age literature by anticipating everybody, puts the 
whole matter into a nutshell : 

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? 
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. 

19 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

There is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I 
have seen quoted innumerable times, and never 
once correctly. Hamlet, addressing Horatio, 
says: 

Give me that man 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. 

The w^ords italicized are invariably written 
''heart of hearts" — as if a person possessed 
that organ in duplicate. Perhaps no one living, 
with the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more 
familiar with the play of Hamlet than my good 
friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart 
plural on two occasions in his recent novel, 
" The Mystery of the Sea." Mrs. Humphry- 
Ward also twice misquotes the passage in 
" Lady Rose's Daughter." 

Books that have become classics — books that 

have had their day and now get more praise 

than perusal — always remind me of venerable 

20 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

colonels and majors and captains who, having 
reached the age limit, find themselves retired 
upon half pay. 

Whether or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself 
into a ball is a subject over which my friend 
John Burroughs and several brother naturalists 
have lately become as heated as if the question 
involved points of theology. Up among the 
Adirondacks, and in the very heart of the re- 
gion of porcupines, I happen to have a modest 
cottage. This retreat is called The Porcupine, 
and I ought by good rights to know something 
about the habits of the small animal from which 
it derives its name. Last winter my dog Buster 
used to return home on an average of three times 
a month from an excursion up Mt. Pisgah with 
his nose stuck full of quills, and he ought to 
have some concrete ideas on the subject. We 
two, then, are prepared to testify that the por- 
cupine in its moments of relaxation occasion- 
ally contracts itself into what might be taken 

21 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

for a ball by persons not too difficult to please 
in the matter of spheres. But neither Buster 
nor I — being unwilling to get into trouble — 
would like to assert that it is an actual ball. 
That it is a shape with which one had better 
not thoughtlessly meddle is a conviction that 
my friend Buster stands ready to defend against 
all comers. 

Wordsworth's characterization of the woman 
in one of his poems as " a creature not too bright 
or good for human nature's daily food " has 
always appeared to me too cannibalesque to be 
poetical. It directly sets one to thinking of the 
South Sea islanders. 

Though lago was not exactly the kind of per- 
son one would select as a superintendent for a 
Sunday-school, his advice to young Roderigo 
was wisdom itself — " Put money in thy purse." 
Whoever disparages money disparages every 
step in the progress of the human race. I lis- 

22 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

tened the other day to a sermon in which gold was 
personified as a sort of glittering devil tempting 
mortals to their ruin. I had an instant of natural 
hesitation when the contribution-plate was passed 
around immediately afterward. Personally, I be- 
lieve that the possession of gold has ruined fewer 
men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises 
have been checked and what fine souls have been 
blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will 
never know. '' After the love of knowledge," 
says Buckle, " there is no one passion which has 
done so much good to mankind as the love of 
money." 

Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable 
medium of communication between persons who 
have nothing to say and persons who would not 
care for anything properly said. 

Dr. Holmes had an odd liking for ingenious 

desk-accessories in the way of pencil-sharpeners, 

paper-weights, penholders, etc. The latest con- 

23 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

trivances in this fashion — probably dropped 
down to him by the inventor angUng for a nibble 
of commendation — were always making one 
another's acquaintance on his study table. He 
once said to me : '' I 'm waiting for somebody to 
invent a mucilage-brush that you can't by any 
accident put into your inkstand. It would save 
me frequent moments of humiliation." 

The deceptive Mr. False and the volatile Mrs. 
Giddy, who figure in the pages of seventeenth 
and eighteenth century fiction, are not tolerated in 
modern novels and plays. Steal the burglar and 
Palette the artist have ceased to be. A name 
indicating the quality or occupation of the bearer 
strikes us as a too ti'ansparent device. Yet there 
are such names in contemporary real life. That 
of our worthy Adjutant-General Drum may be 
instanced. Neal and Pray are a pair of deacons 
who linger in the memory of my boyhood. Sweet 
the confectioner and Lamb the butcher are indi- 
viduals with whom I have had dealings. The 
24 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

old-time sign of Ketchum & Cheetam, Brokers, 
in Wall Street, New York, seems almost too 
good to be true. But it was once, if it is not 
now, an actuality. 

I HAVE observed that whenever a Boston author 
dies, New York immediately becomes a great 
literary centre. 

The possession of unlimited power will make 
a despot of almost any man. There is a pos- 
sible Nero in the gentlest human creature that 
walks. 

Every living author has a projection of him- 
self, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near 
and remote places making friends or enemies 
for him among persons who never lay eyes upon 
the writer in the flesh. When he dies, this phan- 
tasmal personality fades away, and the author 
lives only in the impression created by his own 
literature. It is only then that the world begins 
25 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

to perceive what manner of man the poet, the 
novelist, or the historian really was. Not until 
he is dead, and perhaps some long time dead, is 
it possible for the public to take his exact mea- 
sure. Up to that point contemporary criticism 
has either overrated him or underrated him, or 
ignored him altogether, having been misled by 
the eidolon, which always plays fantastic tricks 
with the writer temporarily under its dominion. 
It invariably represents him as either a greater 
or a smaller personage than he actually is. Pre- 
sently the simulacrum works no more spells, 
good or evil, and the deception is unveiled. The 
hitherto disregarded author is recognized, and 
the idol of yesterday, which seemed so impor- 
tant, is taken down from his too large pedestal 
and carted off to the dumping-ground of inade- 
quate things. To be sure, if he chances to have 
been not entirely unworthy, and on cool exam- 
ination is found to possess some appreciable 
degree of merit, then he is set up on a new slab 
of appropriate dimensions. The late colossal 
26 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

statue shrinks to a modest bas-relief. On the 
other hand, some scarcely noticed bust may 
suddenly become a revered full-length figure. 
Between the reputation of the author living and 
the reputation of the same author dead there is 
ever a wide discrepancy. 

A NOT too enchanting glimpse of Tennyson is 
incidentally given by Charles Brookfield, the 
English actor, in his " Random Recollections." 
Mr. Brookfield's father was, on one occasion, 
dining at the Oxford and Cambridge Club with 
George Venables, Frank Lushington, Alfred 
Tennyson, and others. '' After dinner," relates 
the random recollector, " the poet insisted upon 
putting his feet on the table, tilting back his 
chair more Americano. There were strangers 
in the room, and he was expostulated with for 
his uncouthness, but in vain. ' Do put down 
your feet ! ' pleaded his host. ' Why should I? ' 
retorted Tennyson. ' I 'm very comfortable as 
I am.' ' Every one 's staring at you,' said an- 
27 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

other. ' Let 'em stare,' replied the poet, pla- 
cidly. ' Alfred,' said my father, ' people will 
think you're Longfellow.' Down went the 
feet." That more Americano of Brookfield the 
younger is delicious with its fine insular flavor, 
but the holding up of Longfellow — the soul of 
gentleness, the prince of courtesy — as a buga- 
boo of bad manners is simply inimitable. It 
will take England years and years to detect the 
full unconscious humor of it. 

Great orators who are not also great writers 
become very indistinct historical shadows to the 
generations immediately following them. The 
spell vanishes with the voice. A man's voice is 
almost the only part of him entirely obliterated 
by death. The violet of his native land may be 
made of his ashes, but nature in her economy 
seems to have taken no care of his intonations, 
unless she perpetuates them in restless waves of 
air surging about the poles. The well-graced 
actor who leaves no perceptible record of his 
28 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

genius has a decided advantage over the mere 
orator. The tradition of the player's method 
and presence is associated with works of endur- 
ing beauty. Turning to the pages of the drama- 
tist, we can picture to ourselves the greatness of 
Garrick or Siddons in this or that scene, in this 
or that character. It is not so easy to conjure up 
the impassioned orator from the pages of a dry 
and possibly illogical argument in favor of or 
against some long-ago-exploded measure of gov- 
ernment. The laurels of an orator who is not a 
master of literary art wither quickly. 

All the best sands of my life are somehow get- 
ting into the wrong end of the hour-glass. If I 
could only reverse it ! Were it in my power to 
do so, would I? 

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs 
— putting in his oar, so to speak — with some 
pat word or sentence. The conversation, the 
other evening, had turned on the subject of 
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watches, when one of the gentlemen present, 
the manager of a large watch-making establish- 
ment, told us a rather interesting fact. The 
component parts of a watch are produced by 
different workmen, who have no concern with 
the complex piece of mechanism as a whole, 
and possibly, as a rule, understand it imper- 
fectly. Each worker needs to be expert in only 
his own special branch. When the watch has 
reached a certain advanced state, the work 
requires a touch as delicate and firm as that of 
an oculist performing an operation. Here the 
most skilled and trustworthy artisans are em- 
ployed ; they receive high wages, and have the 
benefit of a singular indulgence. In case the 
workman, through too continuous application, 
finds himself lacking the steadiness of nerve 
demanded by his task, he is allowed without 
forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, in 
order that his hand may recover the requisite 
precision of touch. As I listened, Hamlet's 
courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want of 

30 



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sensibility came drifting into my memory. 
" The hand of Httle employment hath the dain- 
tier sense," says Shakespeare, who has left no- 
thing unsaid. 

It was a festival in honor of Dai Butsu or some 
one of the auxiliary deities that preside over the 
destinies of Japland. For three days and nights 
the streets of Tokio — where the squat little 
brown houses look for all the world as if they 
were mimicking the favorite sitting posture of 
the Japanese — were crowded with smiling hol- 
iday makers, and made gay with devices of 
tinted tissue paper, dolphins, devils, dragons, and 
mythical winged creatures which at night amia- 
bly turned themselves into lanterns. Garlands 
of these, arranged close together, were stretched 
across the streets from ridgepole to ridgepole, 
and your jinrikisha whisked you through inter- 
minable arbors of soft illumination. The spec- 
tacle gave one an idea of fairyland, but then all 
Japan does that. 

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A land not like ours, that land of strange flowers, 
Of daemons and spooks with mysterious powers — 

Of gods who breathe ice, who cause peach-blooms and rice 
And manage the moonshine and turn on the showers. 

Each day has its fair or its festival there. 
And life seems immune to all trouble and care — 
Perhaps only seems, in that island of dreams, 
Sea-girdled and basking in magical air. 

They 've streets of bazaars filled with lacquers and jars, 
And silk stuflTs, and sword-blades that tell of old wats ; 

They 've Fuji's white cone looming up, bleak and lone. 
As if it were trying to reach to the stars. 

They 've temples and gongs, and grim Buddhas in throngs, 
And pearl-powdered geisha with dances and songs : 
Kach girl at her back has an imp, brown or black, 
And dresses her hair in remarkable prongs. 

On roadside and street toddling images meet, 
And smirk and kotow in a way that is sweet; 

Their obis are tied with particular pride, 
Their silken kimonos hang scant to the feet. 

With purrs like a cat they all giggle and chat. 
Now spreading their fans, and now holding them flat; 
A fan by its play whispers, " Go now! " or '• Stay! " 
" I hate you ! " " I love you ! " — a fan can say that! 

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Beneath a dwarf tree, here and there, two or three 
Squat coolies are sipping small cups of green tea; 
They sputter, and leer, and cry out, and appear 
Like bad little chessmen gone off on a spree. 

At night— ah, at night the long streets are a sight, 
With garlands of soft-colored lanterns alight — 

Blue, yellow, and red twinkling high overhead. 
Like thousands of butterflies taking their flight. 

Somewhere in the gloom that no lanterns illume 
Stand groups of slim lilies and jonquils in bloom; 
. On tiptoe, unseen 'mid a tangle of green. 
They offer the midnight their cups of perfume. 

At times, sweet and clear from some tea-garden near, 
A ripple of laughter steals out to your ear; 

Anon the wind brings from a samisen's strings 
The pathos that 's born of a smile and a tear. 

The difference between an English audience 
and a French audience at the theatre is marked. 
The Frenchman brings down a witticism on the 
wing. The Briton pauses for it to ahght and 
give him reasonable time for deliberate aim. In 
English playhouses an appreciable number of 
seconds usually precede the smile or the ripple 
33 



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of laughter that follows a facetious turn of the 
least fineness. I disclaim all responsibility for 
this statement of my personal observation, since 
it has recently been indorsed by one of London's 
most eminent actors. 

At the next table, taking his opal drops of 
absinthe, was a French gentleman with the 
blase aspect of an empty champagne-bottle, 
which always has the air of saying : " I have 
lived ! " 

We often read of wonderful manifestations of 
memory, but they are always instances of the 
faculty working in some special direction. It is 
memory playing, like Paganini, on one string. 
No doubt the persons performing the phenome- 
nal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more 
than they remember. To be able to repeat a 
hundred lines of verse after a single reading is 
no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as 
the hundred lines go. A man might easily fail 

34 



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under such a test, and yet have a good memory ; 
by which I mean a cathoHc one, and that I 
imagine to be nearly the rarest of gifts. I have 
never met more than four or five persons pos- 
sessing it. The small boy who defined memory 
as * ' the thing you forget with " described the 
faculty as it exists and works in the majority of 
men and women. 

The survival in publishers of the imitative in- 
stinct is a strong argument in support of Mr. 
Darwin's theory of the descent of man. One 
publisher no sooner brings out a new style of 
book-cover than half a dozen other publishers 
fall to duplicating it. 

The cavalry sabre hung over the chimney-place 
with a knot of violets tied to the dinted guard, 
there being no known grave to decorate. For 
many a year, on each Decoration Day, a sorrow- 
ful woman had come and fastened these flowers 
there. The first time she brought her offering 
35 



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she was a slender girl, as fresh as her own vio- 
lets. It is a slender figure still, but there are 
threads of silver in the black hair. 

Fortunate was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 
who in early youth was taught " to abstain from 
rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing" — espe- 
cially the fine writing. Simplicity is art's last 
word. 

The man is clearly an adventurer. In the seven- 
teenth century he would have worn huge flint- 
lock pistols stuck into a wide leather belt, and 
been something in the seafaring line. The fel- 
low is always smartly dressed, but where he 
lives and how he lives are as unknown as 
" what song the Sirens sang, or what name 
Achilles assumed when he hid himself among 
women." He is a man who apparently has no 
appointment with his breakfast and whose din- 
ner is a chance acquaintance. His probable 
banker is the next person. A great city like 

36 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

this is the only geography for such a character. 
He would be impossible in a small country 
town, where everybody knows everybody and 
what everybody has for lunch. 

I HAVE been seeking, thus far in vain, for the 
proprietor of the saying that * ' Economy is sec- 
ond or third cousin to Avarice." I went rather 
confidently to Rochefoucauld, but it is not 
among that gentleman's light luggage of cynical 
maxims. 

There is a popular vague impression that butch- 
ers are not allowed to serve as jurors on mur- 
der trials. This is not really the case, but it 
logically might be. To a man daily familiar 
with the lurid incidents of the abattoir., the 
summary extinction of a fellow creature (whe- 
ther the victim or the criminal) can scarcely 
seem a circumstance of so serious moment 
as to another man engaged in less strenuous 
pursuits. 

37 



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We do not, and cannot, read many of the novels 
that most delighted our ancestors. Some of our 
popular fiction is doubtless as poor, but poor 
with a difference. There is always a heavy de- 
mand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation 
the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. 
There is ragtime literature as well as ragtime 
music for the many. 

G is a man who had rather fail in a great 



purpose than not accomplish it in precisely his 
own way. He has the courage of his conviction 
and the intolerance of his courage. He is op- 
posed to the death penalty for murder, but he 
would willingly have any one electrocuted who 
disagreed with him on the subject. 

I HAVE thought of an essay to be called ''On 
the Art of Short-Story Writing," but have given 
it up as smacking too much of the shop. It 
would be too intlme^ since I should have to deal 

38 



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chiefly with my own ways, and so give myself 
the false air of seeming to consider them of im- 
portance. It would interest nobody to know 
that I always write the last paragraph first, and 
then work directly up to that, avoiding all di- 
gressions and side issues. Then who on earth 
would care to be told about the trouble my 
characters cause me by talking too much ? 
They will talk, and I have to let them ; but 
when the story is finished, I go over the dia- 
logue and strike out four fifths of the long 
speeches. I fancy that makes my characters 
pretty mad. 

This is the golden age of the inventor. He is 
no longer looked upon as a madman or a wiz- 
ard, incontinently to be made away with. Two 
or three centuries ago Marconi would not have 
escaped a ropeless end with his wireless telegra- 
phy. Even so late as 1800, the friends of one 
Robert Fulton seriously entertained the lumi- 
nous idea of hustling the poor man into an asy- 
39 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

lum for the unsound before he had a chance to 
fire up the boiler of his tiny steamboat on the 
Hudson river. In olden times the pillory and 
the whipping-post were among the gentler forms 
of encouragement awaiting the inventor. If a 
man devised an especially practical apple-peeler 
he was in imminent danger of being peeled with 
it by an incensed populace. To-day we hail 
with enthusiasm a scientific or a mechanical 
discovery, and stand ready to make a stock 
company of it. 

A MAN is known by the company his mind 
keeps. To live continually with noble books, 
with " high-erected thoughts seated in the heart 
of courtesy," teaches the soul good manners. 

The unconventional has ever a morbid attrac- 
tion for a certain class of mind. There is always 
a small coterie of highly intellectual men and 
women eager to give welcome to whatever is 
eccentric, obscure, or chaotic. Worshipers at 
40 



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the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with 
a sense of tolerant superiority when they say : 
" Of course this is not the kind of thing you 
would like." Sometimes these impressionable 
souls almost seem to make a sort of reputation 
for their fetish. 

I HEAR that B directed to have himself 

buried on the edge of the pond where his duck- 
stand was located, in order that flocks of migrat- 
ing birds might fly over his grave every autumn. 
He did not have to die, to become a dead shot. 

A comrade once said of him : "Yes, B is 

a great sportsman. He has peppered every- 
thing from grouse in North Dakota to his best 
friend in the Maine woods." 

When the novelist introduces a bore into his 
novel he must not let him bore the reader. The 
fellow must be made amusing, which he would 
not be in real life. In nine cases out of ten 
an exact reproduction of real life would prove 
41 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

tedious. Facts are not necessarily valuable, and 
frequently they add nothing to fiction. The art 
of the realistic novelist sometimes seems akin to 
that of the Chinese tailor who perpetuated the 
old patch on the new trousers. True art selects 
and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim 
translation. 

The last meeting I had with Lowell was in the 
north room of his house at Elm wood, the sleep- 
ing-room I had occupied during a two years' 
tenancy of the place in his absence abroad. He 
was lying half propped up in bed, convales- 
cing from one of the severe attacks that were 
ultimately to prove fatal. Near the bed was a 
chair on which stood a marine picture in aqua- 
relle — a stretch of calm sea, a bit of rocky 
shore in the foreground, if I remember, and a 
vessel at anchor. The afternoon sunlight, falling 
through the window, cast a bloom over the pic- 
ture, which was turned toward Lowell. From 
time to time, as he spoke, his eyes rested 
42 



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thoughtfully on the water-color. A friend, he 
said, had just sent it to him. It seemed to me 
then, and the fancy has often haunted me since, 
that that ship, in the golden haze, with top- 
sails loosened, was waiting to bear his spirit 
away. 

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which bar- 
barism masquerades. If somebody has already 
said that, I forgive him the mortification he 
causes me. At the beginning of the twentieth 
century barbarism can throw off its gentle dis- 
guise, and burn a man at the stake as compla- 
cently as in the Middle Ages. 

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into 
the vocabulary of the purist in the next. On 
the other hand, expressions that once were not 
considered inelegant are looked at askance in 
the period following. The word *' brass" was 
formerly an accepted synonym for money ; but 
at present, when it takes on that significance, it 

43 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

is not admitted into genteel circles of language. 
It may be said to have seen better days, like 
another word I have in mind — a vs^ord that has 
become slang, employed in the sense which 
once did not exclude it from very good society. 
A friend lately informed me that he had " fired " 
his housekeeper — that is, dismissed her. He 
little dreamed that he was speaking excellent 
Elizabethan. 

The "Journal des Goncourt" is crowded with 
beautiful and hideous things, like a Japanese 
Museum. 

' ' And she shuddered a^ ^he ^at, ^till silent, on 
her ^eat, and he ^aw that ^he i-huddered." This 
is from Anthony Trollope's novel, " Can You 
Forgive Her?" Can you forgive him? is the 
next question. 

A LITTLE thing may be perfect, but perfection 

is not a little thing. Possessing this quality, a 

44 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

trifle "no bigger than an agate-stone on the 
forefinger of an alderman" shall outlast the 
Pyramids. The world will have forgotten all 
the great masterpieces of literature when it for- 
gets Lovelace's three verses to Lucasta on his 
going to the wars. More durable than marble 
or bronze are the words, "I could not love 
thee, deare, so much, loved I not honor more." 

I CALLED on the dear old doctor this afternoon 
to say good-by. I shall probably not find him 
here when I come back from the long voyage 
which I have in front of me. He is very fragile, 
and looks as though a puff of wind would blow 
him away. He said himself, with his old-time 
cheerfulness, that he was attached to this earth 
by only a little piece of twine. He has percep- 
tibly failed since I saw him a month ago ; but 
he was full of the wise and radiant talk to which 
all the world has listened, and will miss. I 
found him absorbed in a newly made card-cata- 
logue of his library. " It was absurd of me to 
45 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

have it done," he remarked. "What I really 
require is a little bookcase holding only two 
volumes ; then I could go from one to the other 
in alternation and alv^ays find each book as fresh 
as if I never had read it." This arraignment of 
his memory v^as in pure jest, for the doctor's 
mind vs^as to the end like an unclouded crystal. 
It vs^as interesting to note how he studied him- 
self, taking his own pulse, as it were, and diag- 
nosing his own case in a sort of scientific, 
impersonal way, as if it were somebody else's 
case and he were the consulting specialist. I 
intended to spend a quarter of an hour with 
him, and he kept me three hours. I went there 
rather depressed, but I returned home leavened 
with his good spirits, which, I think, will never 
desert him, here or hereafter. To keep the heart 
unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, 
reverent — that is to triumph over old age. 

The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, 
is of no account. The thing that stays, and 

46 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is 
the sincere thing. I am describing the impres- 
sion left upon me by Mr. Howells's blank-verse 
sketch called ' ' Father and Mother : A Mystery " 
— a strangely touching and imaginative piece 
of work, not unlike in effect to some of Mae- 
terlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I 
seemed to be standing in a shadow cast by some 
half -remembered experience of my own in a 
previous state of existence. When I went to 
bed that night I had to lie awake and think it 
over as an event that had actually befallen me. 
I should call the effect weirdy if the word had 
not lately been worked to death. The gloom of 
Poe and the spirituality of Hawthorne touch 
cold finger-tips in those three or four pages. 

For a character-study — a man made up en- 
tirely of limitations. His conservatism and neg- 
ative qualities to be represented as causing him 
to attain success where men of conviction and 
real ability fail of it. 

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A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table 
on board the steamer. During the entire run from 
Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no 
one at meal-times excepting his table steward. 
Seated next to him, on the right, was a viva- 
cious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play, 
spoke '' an infinite deal of nothing.'* He made 
persistent and pathetic attempts to lure his silent 
neighbor (we had christened him " William the 
Silent") into conversation, but a monosyllable 
was always the poor result — until one day. It 
was the last day of the voyage. We had stopped 
at the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver 
the mails, and some fish had been brought 
aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a 
high state of excitement that morning at table. 
'' Fresh fish ! " he exclaimed ; " actually fresh ! 
They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish, 
V of course. Can you tell me, sir," he inquired, 
turning to his gloomy shipmate, " what kind of 
fish these are? " '' Cork soles," said the saturn- 

48 



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ine man, in a deep voice, and then went on 
with his breakfast. 

Lowell used to find food for great mirth in 
General George P. Morris's line. 

Her heart and morning broke together. 

Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however, 
had an attack of the same platitude, and pos- 
sibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature 
seems to have its mischief -making bacilli. The 
late '' incomparable and ingenious Dean of St. 
Paul's " says. 

The day breaks not, it is my heart. 

I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than 
Morris's. Chaucer had the malady in a milder 
form when he wrote : 

Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye. 

The charming naivete of it ! 

Sitting in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the 

Lyceum Theatre one evening during that lady's 

temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bern- 

49 



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hardt picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty 
word on the mirror — Dearling^ mistaking it 
for the word darling. The French actress lighted 
by chance upon a Spenserianism now become 
obsolete without good reason. It is a more 
charming adjective than the one that has re- 
placed it. 

A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly 
rights. He is scarcely buried before old maga- 
zines and newspapers are ransacked in search 
of matters which, for reasons sufficient to him, 
he had carefully excluded from the definitive 
edition of his collected writings. 

He gave the people of his best; 
His worst he kept, his best he gave. 

One can imagine a poet tempted to address 
some such appeal as this to any possible future 
publisher of his poems : 

Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line, 

Take all, take nothing — and God send thee cheer I 

But my anathema on thee and thine 

If thou add'st aught to what is printed here. 

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The claim of this country to call itself "The 
Land of the Free" must be held in abeyance 
until every man in it, whether he belongs or 
does not belong to a labor organization, shall 
have the right to work for his daily bread. 

There is a strain of primitive poetry running 
through the entire Irish race, a fleeting lyrical 
emotion which expresses itself in a flash, usually 
in connection with love of country and kindred 
across the sea. I had a touching illustration of it 
the other morning. The despot who reigns over 
our kitchen was gathering a mess of dandelions on 
the rear lawn. It was one of those blue and gold 
days which seem especially to belong to New Eng- 
land. " It's in County Westmeath I'd be this 
day," she said, looking up at me. " / ^ d go cool 
my hands in the grass on my ould mother's 
grave in the bit of churchyard for eninst 
the friesfs house at Mullingar.^^ I have 
seen poorer poetry than that in the magazines. 
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Speaking of the late Major Pond, the well- 
known director of a lecture bureau, an old client 
of his remarked : ' ' He was a most capable 
manager, but it always made me a little sore to 
have him deduct twenty-five per cent, commis- 
sion." " Pond's Extract," murmured one of the 
gentlemen present. 

Each of our great towns has its *' Little Italy," 
with shops where nothing is spoken but Italian 
and streets in which the alien pedestrian had 
better not linger after nightfall. The chief in- 
dustry of these exotic communities seems to be 
spaghetti and stilettos. What with our Little 
Italys and Chinatowns, and the like, an Ameri- 
can need not cross the ocean in order to visit 
foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of older 
civilizations. 

Poets are made as well as born, the proverb 
notwithstanding. They are made possible by 

52 



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the general love of poetry and the consequent 
imperious demand for it. When this is non- 
existent, poets become mute, the atmosphere 
stifles them. There would have been no Shake- 
speare had there been no Elizabethan audience. 
That was an age when, as Emerson finely puts 
it, 

Men became 
Poets, for the air was fame. 

The stolid gentleman in livery who has his car- 
riage-stand at the corner opposite my house is 
constantly touching on the extremes of human 
experience, with probably not the remotest per- 
ception of the fact. Now he takes a pair of lovers 
out for an airing, and now he drives the abscond- 
ing bank-teller to the railway-station. Except- 
ing as question of distance, the man has positively 
no choice between a theatre and a graveyard. I 
met him this morning dashing up to the portals 
of Trinity Church with a bridal party, and this 
afternoon, as I was crossing Cambridge Bridge, 
I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on 

53 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

his way to Mount Auburn. The wedding af- 
forded him no pleasure, and the funeral gave 
him no grief ; yet he was a factor in both. It is 
his odd destiny to be wholly detached from the 
vital part of his own acts. If the carriage itself 
could speak ! The autobiography of a public 
hack written without reservation would be dra- 
matic reading. 

In this blotted memorandum-book are a score 
or two of suggestions for essays, sketches, and 
poems, which I have not written, and never 
shall write. The instant I jot down an idea the 
desire to utilize it leaves me, and I turn away to 
do something unpremeditated. The shabby vol- 
ume has become a sort of Potter's Field where I 
bury my literary intentions, good and bad, with- 
out any belief in their final resurrection. 

A Stage-direction: Exit Time; enter 
Eternity — with a soliloquy. 



54 



ASIDES 
4- 



TOM FOLIO 

IN my early Boston days a gentle soul was 
often to be met with about town, furtively 
haunting old book-shops and dusty editorial 
rooms, a man of ingratiating simplicity of man- 
ner, who always spoke in a low, hesitating voice, 
with a note of refinement in it. He was a de- 
vout worshiper of Elia, and wrote pleasant dis- 
cursive essays smacking somewhat of his master's 
flavor — suggesting rather than imitating it — 
which he signed " Tom Folio." I forget how 
he glided into my acquaintanceship ; doubtless in 
some way too shy and elusive for remembrance. 
I never knew him intimately, perhaps no one 
did, but the intercourse between us was most 
cordial, and our chance meetings and bookish 
chats extended over a space of a dozen years. 
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Tom Folio — I cling to the winning pseu- 
donym — was sparely built and under medium 
height, or maybe a slight droop of the shoulders 
made it seem so, with a fragile look about him 
and an aspect of youth that was not his. En- 
countering him casually on a street corner, you 
would, at the first glance, have taken him for a 
youngish man, but the second glance left you 
doubtful. It was a figure that struck a note of 
singularity and would have attracted your atten- 
tion even in a crowd. 

During the first four or five years of our ac- 
quaintance, meeting him only out of doors or in 
shops, I had never happened to see him with his 
hat off. One day he recklessly removed it, and 
in the twinkling of an eye he became an elderly 
bald-headed man. The Tom Folio I once knew 
had virtually vanished. An instant earlier he 
v^as a familiar shape ; an instant later, an almost 
unrecognizable individual. A narrow fringe of 
light-colored hair, extending from ear to ear 
under the rear brim of his hat, had perpetrated 
58 



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an unintentional deception by leading one to sup- 
pose a head profusely covered with curly locks. 
" Tom Folio," I said, '' put on your hat and 
come back ! " But after that day he never seemed 
young to me. 

I had few or no inklings of his life discon- 
nected with the streets and the book-stalls, chiefly 
those on Cornhill or in the vicinity. It is possi- 
ble I am wrong in inferring that he occupied a 
room somewhere at the South End or in South 
Boston, and lived entirely alone, heating his cof- 
fee and boiling his egg over an alcohol lamp. I 
got from him one or two fortuitous hints of 
quaint housekeeping. Every winter, it appeared, 
some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch 
of mince pies, twenty or thirty at least. He once 
spoke to me of having laid in his winter pie, just 
as another might speak of laying in his winter 
coal. The only fireside companion Tom Folio 
ever alluded to in my presence was a Maltese 
cat, whose poor health seriously disturbed him 
from time to time. I suspected those mince 
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pies. The cat, I recollect, was named Miss 
Mowcher. 

If he had any immediate family ties beyond 
this I was unaware of them, and not curious to 
be enlightened on the subject. He was more pic- 
turesque solitary. I preferred him to remain so. 
Other figures introduced into the background of 
the canvas would have spoiled the artistic effect. 

Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man — a 
recluse even when he allowed himself to be 
jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream 
of humanity sweeping in opposite directions 
through Washington Street and its busy estu- 
aries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I 
had so little real knowledge of him that I was 
obliged to imagine his more intimate environ- 
ments. However wide of the mark my conjec- 
tures may have fallen, they were as satisfying to 
me as facts would have been. His secluded 
room I could picture to myself with a sense of 
certainty — the couch (a sofa by day), the cup- 
board, the writing-table with its student lamp, 
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the litter of pamphlets and old quartos and oc- 
tavos in tattered bindings, among which were 
scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb, 
and perhaps — nay, surely — an edit to prin- 
ceps of the '' Essays." 

The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower 
or a more loving disciple than Tom Folio. He 
moved and had much of his being in the early 
part of the last century. To him the South-Sea 
House was the most important edifice on the 
globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used 
to be, in spite of all the changes that had be- 
fallen it. It was there Charles Lamb passed the 
novitiate of his long years of clerkship in the 
East India Company. In Tom Folio's fancy a 
slender, boyish figure was still seated, quill in 
hand, behind those stately porticoes looking upon 
Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. That 
famous first paper in the *' Essays," describing 
the South- Sea House and the group of human 
oddities which occupied desks within its gloomy 
chambers, had left an indelible impression upon 
6i 



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the dreamer. Every line traced by the " lean 
annuitant " was as familiar to Tom Folio as if 
he had written it himself. Stray scraps, which 
had escaped the vigilance of able editors, were 
known to him, and it was his to unearth amid 
a heap of mouldy, worm-eaten magazines, a 
handful of leaves hitherto forgotten of all men. 
Trifles, yes — but Charles Lamb's! '^ The 
king's chaff is as good as other people's corn," 
says Tom Folio. 

Often his talk was sweet and racy with old- 
fashioned phrases ; the talk of a man who loved 
books and drew habitual breath in an atmosphere 
of fine thought. Next to Charles Lamb, but at 
a convenable distance, Izaak Walton was Tom 
Folio's favorite. His poet was Alexander Pope, 
though he thought Mr. Addison's tragedy of 
" Cato " contained some proper good lines. Our 
friend was a wide reader in English classics, 
greatly preferring the literature of the earlier pe- 
riods to that of the Victorian age. His smiling, 
tenderly expressed disapprobation of various 
62 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

modern authors was enchanting. John Keats's 
verses were monstrous pretty, but over-orna- 
mented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct 
with cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry 
of Shelley might have been composed in the 
moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning per- 
son. If you wanted a sound mind in a sound 
metrical body, why there was Mr. Pope's " Essay 
on Man." There was something winsome and 
by-gone in the general make-up of Tom Folio. 
No man living in the world ever seemed to me 
to live so much out of it, or to live more com- 
fortably. 

At times I half suspected him of a conva- 
lescent amatory disappointment. Perhaps long 
before I knew him he had taken a little senti- 
mental journey, the unsuccessful end of which 
had touched him with a gentle sadness. It was 
something far off and softened by memory. If 
Tom Folio had any love-affair on hand in my 
day, it must have been of an airy, platonic sort 
— a chaste secret passion for Mistress Peg Wof- 

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PONKAPOG PAPERS 

fington or Nell Gwyn, or possibly Mr. Wal- 
ler's Saccharissa. 

Although Tom Folio was not a collector — 
that means dividends and bank balances — he 
had a passion for the Past and all its belongings, 
with a virtuoso's knowledge of them. A fan 
painted by Vanloo, a bit of rare Nankin (he had 
caught from Charles Lamb the love of old china) , 
or an undoctored stipple of Bartolozzi, gave him 
delight in the handling, though he might not 
aspire to ownership. I believe he would will- 
ingly have drunk any horrible decoction from 
a silver teapot of Queen Anne's time. These 
things were not for him in a coarse, materialistic 
sense ; in a spiritual sense he held possession of 
them in fee-simple. I learned thus much of his 
tastes one day during an hour we spent together 
in the rear showroom of a dealer in antiquities. 

I have spoken of Tom Folio as lonely, but I 
am inclined to think that I mis-stated it. He 
had hosts of friends who used to climb the rather 
steep staircase leading to that modest third-story 

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PONKAPOG PAPERS 

front room which I have Imagined for him — a 
room with Turkey-red curtains, I Hke to believe, 
and a rare engraving of a scene from Mr. Ho- 
garth's excellent moral of " The Industrious and 
Idle Apprentices ' ' pinned against the chimney 
breast. Young Chatterton, who was not always 
the best of company, dropped in at intervals. 
There Mr. Samuel Pepys had a special chair 
reserved for him by the window, where he could 
catch a glimpse of the pretty housemaid over the 
way, chatting with the policeman at the area 
railing. Dr. Johnson and the unworldly author 
of " The Deserted Village " were frequent visit- 
ors, sometimes appearing together arm-in-arm, 
with James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck, fol- 
lowing obsequiously behind. Not that Tom 
Folio did not have callers vastly more aristo- 
cratic, though he could have had none plea- 
santer or wholesomer. Sir Philip Sidney (who 
must have given Folio that copy of the " Arca- 
dia"), the Viscount St. Albans, and even two 
or three others before whom either of these might 

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have doffed his bonnet, did not disdain to gather 
round that hearthstone. Fielding, Smollett, 
Sterne, Defoe, Dick Steele, Dean Swift — there 
was no end to them ! On certain nights, when all 
the stolid neighborhood was lapped in slumber, 
the narrow street stretching beneath Tom Folio's 
windows must have been blocked with invisible 
coaches and sedan-chairs, and illuminated by the 
visionary glare of torches borne by shadowy 
linkboys hurrying hither and thither. A man 
so sought after and companioned cannot be 
described as lonely. 

My memory here recalls the fact that he had 
a few friends less insubstantial — that quaint 
anatomy perched on the top of a hand-organ, to 
whom Tom Folio was wont to give a bite of his 
apple ; and the brown-legged little Neapolitan 
who was always nearly certain of a copper when 
this multi-millionaire strolled through the slums 
on a Saturday afternoon — Saturday probably 
being the essayist's pay-day. The withered 
woman of the peanut- stand on the corner over 
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against Faneuil Hall Market knew him for a 
friend, as did also the blind lead-pencil merchant, 
whom Tom Folio, on occasions, safely piloted 
across the stormy traffic of Dock Square. No- 
blesse oblige I He was no stranger in those 
purlieus. Without designing to confuse small 
things with great, I may say that a certain strip 
of pavement in North Street could be pointed 
out as Tom Folio's Walk, just as Addison's 
Walk is pointed out on the banks of the Cher- 
well at Oxford. 

I used to observe that when Tom Folio was 
not in quest of a print or a pamphlet or some 
such urgent thing, but was walking for mere 
recreation, he instinctively avoided respectable 
latitudes. He liked best the squalid, ill-kept 
thoroughfares shadowed by tall, smudgy tene- 
ment-houses and teeming with unprosperous, 
noisy life. Perhaps he had, half consciously, 
a sense of subtle kinship to the unsuccess and 
cheerful resignation of it all. 

Returning home from abroad one October 

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morning several years ago, I was told that that 
simple spirit had passed on. His death had 
been little heeded ; but in him had passed away 
an intangible genuine bit of Old Boston — as 
genuine a bit, in its kind, as the Autocrat himself 
— a personality not to be restored or replaced. 
Tom Folio could never happen again ! 

Strolling to-day through the streets of the older 
section of the town, I miss many a venerable 
landmark submerged in the rising tide of change, 
but I miss nothing quite so much as I do the 
sight of Tom Folio entering the doorway of the 
Old Corner Bookstore, or carefully taking down 
a musty volume from its shelf at some melan- 
choly old book-stall on Cornhill. 



68 



FLEABODY AND OTHER Q.UEER 

NAMES 



WHEN an English novelist does us the 
honor to introduce any of our country- 
men into his fiction, he generally displays a 
commendable desire to present something typi- 
cal in the way of names for his adopted char- 
acters — to give a dash of local color, as it v^^ere, 
with his nomenclature. His success is seldom 
commensurate to the desire. He falls into the 
error of appealing to his invention, instead of 
consulting some city directory, in which he 
would find more material than he could exhaust 
in ten centuries. Charles Reade might have 
secured in the pages of such a compendium a 
happier title than Fullalove for his Yankee 
sea-captain; though I doubt, on the whole, if 
Anthony TroUope could have discovered any- 
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thing better than Olivia Q. Fleabody for the 
young woman from " the States" in his novel 
called " Is He Popenjoy? " 

To christen a sprightly young female advo- 
cate of woman's rights Olivia Q. Fleabody was 
very happy indeed ; to be candid, it was much 
better than was usual with Mr. TroUope, whose 
understanding of American life and manners was 
not enlarged by extensive travel in this country. 
An English tourist's preconceived idea of us is 
a thing he brings over with him on the steamer 
and carries home again intact ; it is as much a 
part of his indispensable impedimenta as his hat- 
box. But Fleabody is excellent ; it was prob- 
ably suggested by Peabody, w^hich may have 
struck Mr. TroUope as comical (just as Trollope 
strikes us as comical), or, at least, as not seri- 
ous. What a capital name Veronica Trollope 
would be for a hoydenish young woman in a 
society novel ! I fancy that all foreign names 
are odd to the alien. I remember that the signs 
above shop-doors in England and on the Conti- 
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nent used to amuse me often enough, when I 
was over there. It is a notable circumstance 
that extraordinary names never seem extraordi- 
nary to the persons bearing them. If a fellow- 
creature were branded Ebenezer Cuttlefish he 
would remain to the end of his days quite un- 
conscious of anything out of the common. 

I am aware that many of our American names 
are sufficiently queer ; but English writers make 
merry over them, as if our most eccentric were 
not thrown into the shade by some of their own. 
No American, living or dead, can surpass the 
verbal infelicity of KnatchbuU-Hugessen, for ex- 
ample — if the gentleman will forgive me for 
conscripting him. Quite as remarkable, in a 
grimly significant way, is the appellation of a 
British officer who was fighting the Boers in the 
Transvaal in the year of blessed memory 1899.' 
This young soldier, who highly distinguished 
himself on the field, was known to his brothers- 
in-arms as Major Pine Coffin. I trust that the 
gallant major became a colonel later and is still 
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alive. It would eclipse the gayety of nations to 
lose a man with a name like that. 

Several years ago I read in the sober police 
reports of '' The Pall Mall Gazette'' an account 
of a young man named George F. Onions, who 
was arrested (it ought to have been by " a 
peeler") for purloining money from his em- 
ployers, Messrs. Joseph Pickles & Son, stuff 
merchants, of Bradford — des noms bien idyl- 
liques I What mortal could have a more ludi- 
crous name than Onions, unless it were Pickles, 
or Pickled Onions ? And then for Onions to rob 
Pickles ! Could there be a more incredible coin- 
cidence? As a coincidence it is nearly sublime. 
No story -writer would dare to present that fact 
or those names in his fiction ; neither would be 
accepted as possible. Meanwhile Olivia Q. Flea- 
body is ben trovato. 



72 



A NOTE ON ''L'AIGLON" 

'T^HE night-scene on the battlefield of Wa- 
-*- gram in '' L'Aiglon " — an episode whose 
sharp pathos pierces the heart and the imagina- 
tion like the point of a rapier — bears a striking 
resemblance to a picturesque passage in Victor 
Hugo's " Les Miserables." It is the one intense 
great moment in the play, and has been widely 
discussed, but so far as I am aware none of M. 
Rostand's innumerable critics has touched on the 
resemblance mentioned. In the master's ro- 
mance it is not the field of Wagram, but the 
field of Waterloo, that is magically repeopled 
with contending armies of spooks, to use the 
grim old Dutch word, and made vivid to the 
mind's eye. The passage occurs at the end 
of the sixteenth chapter in the second part of 

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" Les Miserables" (Cosette), and runs as 
follows : 

Le champ de Waterloo aujovird'hui a le calme qui 
appartient a la terre, support impassible de I'homme, 
et il resemble a toutes les plaines. La nuit pourtant 
une espece de brume visionnaire s'en ddgage, et si 
quelque vojageur s'j promfene, s'il regarde, s'il ecoute, 
s'il reve comme Virgile dans les funestes plaines de 
Philippes, I'hallucination de la catastrophe le saisit. 
L'effrajant i8 juin revit ; la fausse colline-monument 
s'efface, ce lion quelconque se dissipe, le champ de 
bataille reprend sa reality ; des lignes d'infanterie 
ondulent dans la plaine, des galops furieux traversent 
I'horizon ; le songeur effare voit I'eclair des sabres, 
I'etincelle des bajonnettes, le flamboiement des bombes, 
I'entre-croisement monstrueux des tonnerres ; il en- 
tend, comme un rale au fond d'une tombe, la clameur 
vague de la bataille-fantdme ; ces ombres, ce sont les 
grenadiers ; ces lueurs, ce sont les cuirassiers ; . . . 
tout cela n'est plus et se heurte et combat encore ; et 
les ravins s'empourprent, et les arbres frissonnent, et 
il y a de la furie jusque dans les nuees, et, dans les 
tenebres, toutes ces hauteurs farouches, Mont-Saint- 
Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plance- 

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noit, apparaissent confus^ment couronnees de tour- 
billons de spectres s'exterminant.^ 

Here is the whole battle scene in " L'Aiglon," 
with scarcely a gruesome detail omitted. The 
vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light ; the 
ghostly squadrons hurling themselves against 

1 The field of Waterloo has to-day the peacefulness which be- 
longs to earth, the impassive support of man, and is like all other 
plains. At night, however, a kind of visionary mist is exhaled, 
and if any traveler walks there, and watches and listens, and 
dreams like Virgil on the sorrowful plains of Philippi, the hallu- 
cination of the catastrophe takes possession of him. The terrible 
June i8 relives ; the artificial commemorative mound effaces itself, 
the lion disappears, the field of battle assumes its reality; lines 
of infantry waver on the plain, the horizon is broken by furious 
charges of cavalry; the alarmed dreamer sees the gleam of sabres, 
the glimmer of bayonets, the lurid glare of bursting shells, the 
clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the muffled clamor of the 
phantom conflict comes to him like dying moans from the tomb; 
these shadows are grenadiers, these lights are cuirassiers ... all 
this does not really exist, yet the combat goes on ; the ravines are 
stained with purple, the trees tremble, there is fury even in the 
clouds, and in the obscurity the sombre heights — Mont-Saint- 
Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit — ap- 
pear dimly crowned with throngs of apparitions annihilating one 
another. 

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one another (seen only through the eyes of the 
poor Httle Duke of Reichstadt) ; the mangled 
shapes lying motionless in various postures of 
death upon the blood-stained sward ; the moans 
of the wounded rising up and sweeping by like 
vague wailings of the wind — all this might be 
taken for an artful appropriation of Victor 
Hugo's text ; but I do not think it was, though 
it is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant 
page, read in early youth, still lingered on the 
retina of M. Rostand's memory. If such were 
the case, it does not necessarily detract from the 
integrity of the conception or the playwright's 
presentment of it. 

The idea of repeopling old battlefields with 
the shades of vanished hosts is not novel. In 
such tragic spots the twilight always lays a dark 
hand on the imagination, and prompts one to 
invoke the unappeased spirit of the past that 
haunts the place. One summer evening long 
ago, as I was standing alone by the ruined walls 
of Hougomont, with that sense of not being 

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alone which is sometimes so strangely stirred by 
solitude, I had a sudden vision of that desperate 
last charge of Napoleon's Old Guard. Marshal 
Ney rose from the grave and again shouted 
those heroic words to Drouet d'Erlon : "Are 
you not going to get yourself killed ? ' ' For 
an instant a thousand sabres flashed in the 
air. The deathly silence that accompanied the 
ghostly onset was an added poignancy to the 
short-lived dream. A moment later I beheld a 
hunched little figure mounted on a white horse 
with housings of purple velvet. The reins lay 
slack in the rider's hand ; his three-cornered hat 
was slouched over his brows, and his chin 
rested on the breast of his great-coat. Thus he 
slowly rode away through the twilight, and 
nobody cried, Vive V Em-pereur i 

The ground on which a famous battle has 
been fought casts a spell upon every man's 
mind ; and the impression made upon two men 
of poetic genius, like Victor Hugo and Edmond 
Rostand, might well be nearly identical. This 
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sufficiently explains the likeness between the 
fantastic silhouette in ' ' Les Miserables " and the 
battle of the ghosts in " L'Aiglon." A muse so 
rich in the improbable as M. Rostand's need 
not borrow a piece of supernaturalness from 
anybody. 



78 



PLOT AND CHARACTER 

T TENRY JAMES, in his paper on Anthony 
-*- -*- Trollope, says that if Trollope " had taken 
sides on the rather superficial opposition between 
novels of character and novels of plot, I can 
imagine him to have said (except that he never 
expressed himself in epigram) that he preferred 
the former class, inasmuch as character in itself 
is plot, while plot is by no means character." 
So neat an antithesis would surely never have 
found itself between Mr. Trollope's lips if Mr. 
James had not cunningly lent it to him. What- 
ever theory of novel-writing Mr. Trollope may 
have preached, his almost invariable practice 
was to have a plot. He always had a story to 
tell, and a story involves beginning, middle, and 
end — in short, a framework of some description. 
There have been delightful books filled wholly 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 

with character-drawing ; but they have not been 
great novels. The great novel deals with human 
action as well as with mental portraiture and 
analysis. That ''character in itself is plot" is 
true only in a limited sense. A plan, a motive 
with a logical conclusion, is as necessary to a 
novel or a romance as it is to a drama. A group 
of skillfully made-up men and women lounging 
in the green-room or at the wings is not the 
play. It is not enough to say that this is Romeo 
and that Lady Macbeth. It is not enough to 
inform us that certain passions are supposed to 
be embodied in such and such persons : these 
persons should be placed in situations develop- 
ing those passions. A series of unrelated scenes 
and dialogues leading to nothing is inadequate. 

Mr. James's engaging epigram seems to me 
vulnerable at both ends — unlike Achilles. 
"Plot is by no means character." Strictly 
speaking, it is not. It appears to me, however, 
that plot approaches nearer to being character 
than character does to being plot. Plot necessi- 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 

tates action, and it is impossible to describe a 
man's actions, under whatever conditions, with- 
out revealing something of his character, his 
way of looking at things, his moral and mental 
pose. What a hero of fiction does paints him 
better than what he says^ and vastly better than 
anything his creator may say of him. Mr. 
James asserts that ' ' we care what happens to 
people only in proportion as we know what 
people are." I think we care very little what 
people are (in fiction) when we do not know 
what happens to them. 



8i 



THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE 

IN the process of their experiments upon the 
bodies of living animals some anatomists do 
not, I fear, sufficiently realize that 

The poor beetle, that we tread upon, 

In corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great 

As when a giant dies. 

I am not for a moment challenging the neces- 
sity of vivisection, though distinguished sur- 
geons have themselves challenged it ; I merely 
contend that science is apt to be cold-hearted, 
and does not seem alvs^ays to take into consider- 
ation the tortures she inflicts in her search for 
knowledge. 

Just now, in turning over the leaves of an old 

number of the *' London Lancet," I came upon 

the report of a lecture on experimental physiology 

delivered by Professor William Rutherford be- 

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fore a learned association in London. Though 
the type had become antiquated and the paper 
yellowed in the lapse of years, the pathos of 
those pages was alive and palpitating. 

The following passages from the report will 
illustrate not unfairly the point I am making. 
In the course of his remarks the lecturer ex- 
hibited certain interesting experiments on living 
frogs. Intellectually I go very strongly for Pro- 
fessor Rutherford, but I am bound to confess 
that the weight of my sympathy rests with the 
frogs. 

Observe this frog [said the professor], it is regard- 
ing our manoeuvres with a somewhat lively air. Now 
and then it gives a jump. What the precise object of 
its leaps may be I dare not pretend to say ; but prob- 
ably it regards us with some apprehension, and desires 
to escape. 

To be perfectly impartial, it must be admitted 
that the frog had some slight reason for appre- 
hension. The lecturer proceeded : 

I touch one of its toes, and you see it resents the 

83 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

molestation in a very decided manner. Why does it so 
struggle to get away when I pinch its toes ? Doubt- 
less, you will say, because it feels the pinch and would 
rather not have it repeated. I now behead the animal 
with the aid of a sharp chisel. . . . The headless trunk 
lies as though it were dead. The spinal cord seems to 
be suffering from shock. Probably, however, it will 
soon recover from this. . . . Observe that the animal 
has now spo7ttaneously drawn up its legs and arms, 
and it is sitting with its neck erect just as if it had 
not lost its head at all. I pinch its toes, and you see 
the leg is at once thrust out as if to spurn away the 
offending instrument. Does it still feel? and is the 
motion still the result of the volition } 

That the frog did feel, and delicately hinted 
at the circumstance, there seems to be no room 
to doubt, for Professor Rutherford related that 
having once decapitated a frog, the animal sud- 
denly bounded from the table, a movement that 
presumably indicated a kind of consciousness. 
He then returned to the subject immediately 
under observation, pinched its foot again, the 
frog again ' ' resenting the stimulation." He then 

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thrust a needle down the spinal cord. "The 
limbs are now flaccid," observed the experi- 
menter; "we may wait as long as we please, 
but a pinch of the toes will never again cause 
the limbs of this animal to move." Here is 
where congratulations can come in for la gre- 
nouille. That frog being concluded, the lec- 
turer continued : 

I take another frog. In this case I open the cranium 
and remove the brain and medulla oblongata. . . . 
I thrust a pin through the nose and hang the animal 
thereby to a support, so that it can move its pendent 
legs without any difficulty. ... I gently pinch the 
toes. . . . The leg of the same side is pulled up. . . . 
I pinch the same more severely. . . . Both legs are 
thrown into motion. 

Having thus satisfactorily proved that the 
wretched creature could still suffer acutely, the 
professor resumed : 

The cutaneous nerves of the frog are extremely sen- 
sitive to acids ; so I put a drop of acetic acid on the 
outside of one knee. This, you see, gives rise to most 
violent movements both of arms and legs, and notice 

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particularly that the animal is using the toes of the 
leg on the same side for the purpose of rubbing the 
irritated spot. I dip the whole animal into water 
in order to wash away the acid, and now it is all at 
rest again. ... I put a drop of acid on the skin 
over the lumbar region of the spine. . . . Both feet 
are instantly raised to the irritated spot. The animal 
is able to localize the seat of irritation. ... I wash 
the acid from the back, and I amputate one of the 
feet at the ankle. ... I apply a drop of acid over 
the knee of the footless leg. . . . Again, the animal 
turns the leg towards the knee, as if to reach the irri- 
tated spot with the toes ; these, however, are not now 
available. But watch the other foot. The foot of the 
other leg is now being used to rub away the acid. The 
animal, finding that the object is not accomplished 
with the foot of the same side, uses the other one. 

I think that at least one thing will be patent 
to every unprejudiced reader of these excerpts, 
namely — that any frog (with its head on or 
its head off) which happened to make the per- 
sonal acquaintance of Professor Rutherford must 
have found him poor company. What benefit 
'^6 



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science may have derived from such association 
I am not qualified to pronounce upon. The lec- 
turer showed conclusively that the frog is a 
peculiarly sensitive and intelligent little batra- 
chian. I hope that the genial professor, in the 
years which followed, did not frequently con- 
sider it necessary to demonstrate the fact. 



87 



LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORN- 
WALL 

TT has recently become the fashion to speak 
-*- disparagingly of Leigh Hunt as a poet, to 
class him as a sort of pursuivant or shield-bearer 
to Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Truth to tell, 
Hunt was not a Keats nor a Shelley nor a Cole- 
ridge, but he was a most excellent Hunt. He 
was a delightful essayist — quite unsurpassed, 
indeed, in his blithe, optimistic way — and as a 
poet deserves to rank high among the lesser 
singers of his time. I should place him far 
above Barry Cornwall, who has net half the 
freshness, variety, and originality of his com- 
peer. 

I instance Barry Cornwall because there has 
seemed a disposition since his death to praise 
him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 

me as extremely artificial, especially in his dra- 
matic sketches. His verses in this line are 
mostly soft Elizabethan echoes. Of course a 
dramatist may find it to his profit to go out of 
his own age and atmosphere for inspiration ; but 
in order successfully to do so he must be a dra- 
matist. Barry Cornwall fell short of filling the 
role ; he got no further than the composing of 
brief disconnected scenes and scraps of solilo- 
quies, and a tragedy entitled Mirandola, for 
which the stage had no use. His chief claim to 
recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in the 
dramatic studies, his attitude is nearly always 
affected. He studiously strives to reproduce the 
form and spirit of the early poets. Being a Lon- 
doner, he naturally sings much of rural English 
life, but his England is the England of two or 
three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say 
about the " falcon," but the poor bird has the 
air of beating fatigued wings against the book- 
shelves of a well-furnished library. This well- 
furnished library was — if I may be pardoned a 

89 



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mixed image — the rock on which Barry Corn- 
wall split. He did not look into his own heart, 
and write : he looked into his books. 

A poet need not confine himself to his indi- 
vidual experiences ; the world is all before him 
where to choose ; but there are subjects which 
he had better not handle unless he have some 
personal knowledge of them. The sea is one of 
these. The man who sang, 

The sea! the sea! the open sea! 
The blue, the fresh, the ever free ! 

(a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have 
penned), should never have permitted himself to 
sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of 
Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I 
first read this singularly vapid poem years ago, 
in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had 
ever laid eyes on any piece of water wider than 
the Thames at Greenwich, and in looking over 
Barry Cornwall's " Life and Letters" I am not 
so much surprised as amused to learn that he was 
never out of sight of land in the whole course 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 

of his existence. It is to be said of him more 
positively than the captain of the Pinafore said 
it of himself, that he was hardly ever sick at 
sea. 

Imagine Byron or Shelley, v^ho knew the 
ocean in all its protean moods, piping such 
thin feebleness as 

The blue, the fresh, the ever free ! 

To do that required a man whose acquaintance 
with the deep was limited to a view of it from 
an upper window at Margate or Scarborough. 
Even frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait 
at the sign of The Ship and Turtle will not en- 
able one to write sea poetry. 

Considering the actual facts, there is some- 
thing weird in the statement, 

I 'm on the sea ! I 'm on the sea I 
I am where I would ever be. 

The words, to be sure, are placed in the mouth 
of an imagined sailor, but they are none the 
less diverting. The stanza containing the distich 
ends with a striking piece of realism : 
91 



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If a storm should come and awake the deep, 
What matter? I shall ride and sleep. 

This is the course of action usually pursued 
by sailors during a gale. The first or second 
mate goes around and tucks them up comfort- 
ably, each in his hammock, and serves them 
out an extra^ration of grog after the storm is 
over. 

Barry Cornwall must have had an exception- 
ally winning personality, for he drew to him the 
friendship of men as differently constituted as 
Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster. 
He was liked by the best of his time, from 
Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne, 
who caught a glimpse of the aged poet in his 
vanishing. The personal magnetism of an au- 
thor does not extend far beyond the orbit of his 
contemporaries. It is of the lyrist and not of 
the man I am speaking here. One could wish 
he had written more prose like his admirable 
'' Recollections of Elia." 

Barry Cornwall seldom sounds a natural note, 
93 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

but when he does it is extremely sweet. That 
little ballad in the minor key beginning, 

Touch us gently, Time ! 

Let us glide adown thy stream, 

was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh 
Hunt, though not without questionable manner- 
isms, was rich in the inspiration that came but 
infrequently to his friend. Hunt's verse is full 
of natural felicities. He also was a bookman, 
but, unlike Barry Cornwall, he generally knew 
how to mint his gathered gold, and to stamp the 
coinage with his own head. In " Hero and Lean- 
der " there is one line which, at my valuing, is 
worth any twenty stanzas that Barry Cornwall 
has written : 

So might they now have lived, and so have died; 
The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side. 

Hunt's fortunate verse about the kiss Jane 
Carlyle gave him lingers on everybody's lip. 
That and the rhyme of ' ' Abou Ben Adhem and 
the Angel " are spice enough to embalm a man's 
memory. After all, it takes only a handful. 
93 



DECORATION DAY 

HOW quickly Nature takes possession of 
a deserted battlefield, and goes to work 
repairing the ravages of man ! With invisible 
magic hand she smooths the rough earthworks, 
fills the rifle-pits with delicate flowers, and 
wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent 
drapery of tendrils. Soon the whole sharp out- 
line of the spot is lost in unremembering grass. 
Where the deadly rifle-ball whistled through the 
foliage, the robin or the thrush pipes its tremu- 
lous note ; and where the menacing shell de- 
scribed its curve through the air, a harmless 
crow flies in circles. Season after season the 
gentle work goes on, healing the wounds and 
rents made by the merciless enginery of war, 
until at last the once hotly contested battle- 
ground differs from none of its quiet surround- 

94 



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ings, except, perhaps, that here the flowers take 
a richer tint and the grasses a deeper emerald. 

It is thus the battle lines may be obliterated 
by Time, but there are left other and more last- 
ing relics of the struggle. That dinted army 
sabre, with a bit of faded crepe knotted at its 
hilt, which hangs over the mantel-piece of the 
" best room " of many a town and country house 
in these States, is one ; and the graven headstone 
of the fallen hero is another. The old swords 
will be treasured and handed down from gener- 
ation to generation as priceless heirlooms, and 
with them, let us trust, will be cherished the 
custom of dressing with annual flowers the rest- 
ing-places of those who fell during the Civil 
War. 

With the tears a Land hath" shed 
Their graves should ever be green. 

Ever their fair, true glory 

Fondly should fame rehearse — 
Light of legend and story, 

Flower of marble and verse. 

95 



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The impulse which led us to set apart a day 
for decorating the graves of our soldiers sprung 
from the grieved heart of the nation, and in our 
ov^n time there is little chance of the rite being 
neglected. But the generations that come after 
us should not allow the observance to fall into 
disuse. What with us is an expression of fresh 
love and sorrow, should be with them an ac- 
knowledgment of an incalculable debt. 

Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our 
national holidays. How different from those sul- 
len batteries which used to go rumbling thi'ough 
our streets are the crowds of light carriages, 
laden with flowers and greenery, wending their 
way to the neighboring cemeteries ! The grim 
cannon have turned into palm branches, and the 
shell and shrapnel into peach blooms. There is 
no hint of war in these gay baggage trains, ex- 
cept the presence of men in undress uniform, 
and perhaps here and there an empty sleeve to 
remind one of what has been. Year by year 
that empty sleeve is less in evidence. 

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The observance of Decoration Day is un- 
marked by that disorder and confusion common 
enough with our people in their holiday moods. 
The earlier sorrow has faded out of the hour, 
leaving a softened solemnity. It quickly ceased 
to be simply a local commemoration. While 
the sequestered country churchyards and burial- 
places near our great northern cities were being 
hung with May garlands, the thought could not 
but come to us that there v^ere graves lying 
southward above which bent a grief as tender 
and sacred as our own. Invisibly we dropped 
unseen flowers upon those mounds. There is a 
beautiful significance in the fact that, two years 
after the close of the war, the women of Colum- 
bus, Mississippi, laid their offerings alike on 
Northern and Southern graves. When all is 
said, the great Nation has but one heart. 



97 



WRITERS AND TALKERS 

AS a class, literary men do not shine in con- 
versation. The scintillating and playful 
essayist whom you pictured to yourself as the 
most genial and entertaining of companions, 
turns out to be a shy and untalkable individual, 
who chills you with his reticence when you 
chance to meet him. The poet whose fascinating 
volume you always drop into your gripsack on 
your summer vacation — the poet whom you 
have so long desired to know personally — is a 
moody and abstracted middle-aged gentleman, 
who fails to catch your name on introduction, 
and seems the avatar of the commonplace. The 
witty and ferocious critic whom your fancy had 
painted as a literary cannibal with a morbid 
appetite for tender young poets — the writer of 

98 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 
those caustic and scholarly reviews which you 
never neglect to read — destroys the un-lif elike 
portrait you had drawn by appearing before you 
as a personage of slender limb and deprecat- 
ing glance, who stammers and makes a painful 
spectacle of himself when you ask him his 
opinion of " The Glees of the Gulches," by Poto- 
catapetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novel- 
ist of your imagination, with epigrammatic 
points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape 
of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose 
conversation does not sparkle at all, and you 
were on the lookout for the most brilliant of 
verbal fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you 
have idealized. Fresh from witnessing his de- 
lightful comedy of manners, you meet him face 
to face only to discover that his own manners 
are anything but delightful. The play and the 
playwright are two very distinct entities. You 
grow skeptical touching the truth of Buffon's 
assertion that the style is the man himself. Who 
that has encountered his favorite author in the 
99 

lofC. 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

flesh has not sometimes been a little, if not 
wholly, disappointed? 

After all, is it not expecting too much to 
expect a novelist to talk as cleverly as the clever 
characters in his novels? Must a dramatist 
necessarily go about armed to the teeth with 
crisp dialogue? May not a poet be allowed to 
lay aside his singing-robes and put on a con- 
ventional dress-suit when he dines out? Why 
is it not permissible in him to be as prosaic 
and tiresome as the rest of the company? He 
usually is. 



lOO 



ON EARLY RISING 

A CERTAIN scientific gentleman of my 
-*- -^ acquaintance, who has devoted years to 
investigating the subject, states that he has never 
come across a case of remarkable longevity un- 
accompanied by the habit of early rising ; from 
which testimony it might be inferred that they 
die early who lie abed late. But this would be 
getting out at the wrong station. That the 
majority of elderly persons are early risers is due 
to the simple fact that they cannot sleep morn- 
ings. After a man passes his fiftieth milestone 
he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakeful- 
ness is no credit to him. As the theorist con- 
fined his observations to the aged, he easily 
reached the conclusion that men live to be old 
because they do not sleep late, instead of per- 
ceiving that men do not sleep late because they 

lOI 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

are old. He moreover failed to take into ac- 
count the numberless young lives that have been 
shortened by matutinal habits. 

The intelligent reader, and no other is sup- 
posable, need not be told that the early bird 
aphorism is a w^arning and not an incentive. 
The fate of the w^orm refutes the pretended 
ethical teaching of the proverb, w^hich assumes 
to illustrate the advantage of early rising and 
does so by shovs^ing how extremely dangerous 
it is. I have no patience with the worm, and 
when I rise with the lark I am always careful 
to select a lark that has overslept himself. 

The example set by this mythical bird, a myth- 
ical bird so far as New England is concerned, 
has wrought wide-spread mischief and discom- 
fort. It is worth noting that his method of ac- 
complishing these ends is directly the reverse of 
that of the Caribbean insect mentioned by Laf- 
cadio Hearn in his enchanting ' ' Two Years in 
the French West Indies " — a species of colossal 
cricket called the wood-kid ; in the Creole tongue, 

I02 



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cahritt-bois. This ingenious pest works a sooth- 
ing, sleep-compelling chant from sundown until 
precisely half past four in the morning, when 
it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens 
everybody it has lulled into slumber with its in- 
sidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with strange obtuse- 
ness to the enormity of the thing, blandly re- 
marks : ' ' For thousands of early risers too poor 
to own a clock, the cessation of its song is the 
signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of 
the West India islands furnishing such satanic 
entomological specimens will ever be annexed 
to the United States. Some of our extreme ad- 
vocates of territorial expansion might spend a 
profitable few weeks on one of those favored 
isles. A brief association with that cabritt-bois 
would be likely to cool the enthusiasm of the 
most ardent imperialist. 

An incalculable amount of specious sentiment 

has been lavished upon daybreak, chiefly by poets 

who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, at 

mid-day. It is charitably to be said that their 

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practice was better than their precept — or their 
poetry. Thomson, the author of " The Castle 
of Indolence," who gave birth to the depraved 
apostrophe. 

Falsely luxurious, will not man awake, 

was one of the laziest men of his century. He 
customarily lay in bed until noon meditating 
pentameters on sunrise. This creature used to 
be seen in his garden of an afternoon, with both 
hands in his waistcoat pockets, eating peaches 
from a pendent bough. Nearly all the English 
poets who at that epoch celebrated what they 
called " the effulgent orb of day " were denizens 
of London, where pure sunshine is unknown 
eleven months out of the twelve. 

In a great city there are few incentives to 
early rising. What charm is there in roof-tops 
and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape even 
from a nightmare? What is more depressing 
than a city street before the shop -windows have 
lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem 
asleep," as Wordsworth says, and nobody is 
104 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

astir but the belated burglar or the milk-and- 
water man or Mary washing off the front steps ? 
Daybreak at the seaside or up among the moun- 
tains is sometimes worth while, though famil- 
iarity with it breeds indifference. The man 
forced by restlessness or occupation to drink the 
first vintage of the morning every day of his life 
has rio right appreciation of the beverage, how- 
ever much he may profess to relish it. It is 
only your habitual late riser who takes in the 
full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when 
he gets up to go a-fishing. He brings virginal 
emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling 
freshness of earth and stream and sky. For him 
— a momentary Adam — the world is newly 
created. It is Eden come again, with Eve in the 
similitude of a three-pound trout. 

In the country, then, it is well enough occa- 
sionally to dress by candle-light and assist at the 
ceremony of dawn ; it is well if for no other 
purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the 
professional early riser who, were he in a state 

105 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

of perfect health, would not be the wandering 
victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are 
few small things more exasperating than this 
early bird with the worm of his conceit in his 
bill. 



1 06 



UN POETE MANQUE 

IN the first volume of Miss Dickinson's poet- 
ical melange is a little poem which needs 
only a slight revision of the initial stanza to 
entitle it to rank w^ith some of the swallow- 
flights in Heine's lyrical intermezzo. I have ten- 
tatively tucked a rhyme into that opening stanza : 

I taste a liquor never brewed 
In vats upon the Rhine; 
No tankard ever held a draught 
Of alcohol like mine. 

Inebriate of air am I, 

And debauchee of dew, 

Reeling, through endless summer days, 

From inns of molten blue. 

When landlords turn the drunken bee 
Out of the Foxglove's door. 
When butterflies renounce their drams, 
I shall but drink the more ! 
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Till seraphs swing their snowy caps 
And saints to windows run, 
To see the little tippler 
Leaning against the sun! 

Those inns of molten blue, and the disreputable 
honey-gatherer who gets himself turned out-of- 
doors at the sign of the Foxglove, are very 
taking matters. I know of more important 
things that interest me vastly less. This is one 
of the ten or twelve brief pieces so nearly per- 
fect in structure as almost to warrant the reader 
in suspecting that Miss Dickinson's general dis- 
regard of form was a deliberate affectation. The 
artistic finish of the following sunset-piece 
makes her usual quatrains unforgivable : 

This is the land the sunset washes, 
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea ; 
Where it rose, or whither it rushes, 
These are the western mystery ! 

Night after night her purple traffic 
Strews the landing with opal bales; 
Merchantmen poise upon horizons, 
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails, 
1 08 



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The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere 
of a Claude Lorraine. One instantly frames it 
in one's memory. Several such bits of impres- 
sionist landscape may be found in the portfolio. 
It is to be said, in passing, that there are few 
things in Miss Dickinson's poetry so felicitous 
as Mr. Higginson's characterization of it in his 
preface to the volume: " In many cases these 
verses will seem to the reader like foetry 
pulled up by the roots^ with rain and dew and 
earth cHnging to them." Possibly it might be 
objected that this is not the best way to gather 
either flowers or poetry. 

Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely un- 
conventional and bizarre mind. She was deeply 
tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly 
influenced by the mannerism of Emerson. The 
very gesture with which she tied her bonnet- 
strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like 
walks in her claustral garden at Amherst, must 
have had something dreamy and Emersonian 
in it. She had much fancy of a quaint kind, 
109 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

but only, as it appears to me, intermittent 
flashes of imagination. 

That Miss Dickinson's memoranda have a cer- 
tain something which, for want of a more pre- 
cise name, we term quality^ is not to be denied. 
But the incoherence and shapelessness of the 
greater part of her verse are fatal. On nearly 
every page one lights upon an unsupported 
exquisite line or a lonely happy epithet ; but a 
single happy epithet or an isolated exquisite line 
does not constitute a poem. What Lowell says 
of Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss 
Dickinson: ''Donne is full of salient verses 
that would take the rudest March winds of 
criticism with their beauty, of thoughts that first 
tease us like charades and then delight us with 
the felicity of their solution ; but these have not 
saved him. He is exiled to the limbo of the 
formless and the fragmentary." 

Touching this question of mere technique Mr. 
Ruskin has a word to say (it appears that he 
said it "in his earlier and better days"), and 
no 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

Mr. Higginson quotes it : " No weight, nor 
mass, nor beauty of execution can outweigh one 
grain or fragment of thought." This is a pro- 
position to which one would cordially subscribe 
if it were not so intemperately stated. A sug- 
gestive commentary on Mr. Ruskin's impressive 
dictum is furnished by his own volume of verse. 
The substance of it is weighty enough, but the 
workmanship lacks just that touch which dis- 
tinguishes the artist from the bungler — the 
touch which Mr. Ruskin, except when writing 
prose, appears not much to have regarded either 
in his later or " in his earlier and better days." 
Miss Dickinson's stanzas, with their impos- 
sible rhyme, their involved significance, their 
interrupted flute-note of birds that have no con- 
tinuous music, seem to have caught the ear of a 
group of eager listeners. A shy New England 
bluebird, shifting its light load of song, has for 
the moment been mistaken for a stray nightin- 
gale. 



Ill 



THE MALE COSTUME OF THE 
PERIOD 

I WENT to see a play the other night, one of 
those good old-fashioned English comedies 
that are in five acts and seem to be in fifteen. 
The piece with its wrinkled conventionality, its 
archaic stiffness, and obsolete code of morals, 
was devoid of interest excepting as a collection 
of dramatic curios. Still I managed to sit it 
through. The one thing in it that held me a 
pleased spectator was the graceful costume of a 
certain player who looked like a fine old por- 
trait — by Vandyke or Velasquez, let us say — 
that had come to life and kicked off its tar- 
nished frame. 

I do not know at what epoch of the world's 
history the scene of the play was laid ; possibly 
the author originally knew, but it was evident 

112 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

that the actors did not, for their make-ups re- 
presented quite antagonistic periods. This cir- 
cumstance, however, detracted only slightly from 
the special pleasure I took in the young person 
called Delorme. He was not in himself inter- 
esting; he was like that Major Waters in 
*' Pepys's Diary '* — "a most amorous melan- 
choly gentleman who is under a despayr in love, 
which makes him bad company ; " it was en- 
tirely Delorme's dress. 

I never saw mortal man in a dress more sen- 
sible and becoming. The material was accord- 
ing to Polonius's dictum, rich but not gaudy, of 
some dark cherry-colored stuff with trimmings 
of a deeper shade. My idea of a doublet is so 
misty that I shall not venture to affirm that the 
gentleman wore a doublet. It was a loose coat 
of some description hanging negligently from 
the shoulders and looped at the throat, showing 
a tasteful arrangement of lacework below and at 
the wrists. Full trousers reaching to the tops of 
buckskin boots, and a low-crowned soft hat — 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

not a Puritan's sugar-loaf, but a picturesque 
shapeless head-gear, one side jauntily fastened 
up with a jewel — completed the essential por- 
tions of our friend's attire. It was a costume to 
walk in, to ride in, to sit in. The wearer of it 
could not be awkward if he tried, and I will do 
Delorme the justice to say that he put his dress 
to some severe tests. But he was graceful all 
the while, and made me wish that my country- 
men would throw aside their present hideous 
habiliments and hasten to the measuring-room 
of Delorme's tailor. 

In looking over the plates of an old book of 
fashions we smile at the monstrous attire in 
which our worthy great-grandsires saw fit to 
deck themselves. Presently it will be the turn 
of posterity to smile at us, for in our own way 
we are no less ridiculous than were our ances- 
tors in their knee-breeches, pig-tail and chafeau 
de bras. In fact we are really more absurd. If 
a fashionably dressed man of to-day could catch 
a single glimpse of himself through the eyes of 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 
his descendants four or five generations re- 
moved, he would have a strong impression of 
being something that had escaped from some- 
where. 

Whatever strides we may have made in arts 
and sciences, we have made no advance in the 
matter of costume. That Americans do not 
tattoo themselves, and do go fully clad — I am 
speaking exclusively of my own sex — is about 
all that can be said in favor of our present 
fashions. I wish I had the vocabulary of Herr 
Teufelsdrockh with which to inveigh against 
the dress-coat of our evening parties, the angu- 
lar swallow-tailed coat that makes a man look 
like a poor species of bird and gets him mis- 
taken for the waiter. " As long as a man wears 
the modern coat," says Leigh Hunt, '' he has no 
right to despise any dress. What snips at the 
collar and lapels ! What a mechanical and ridic- 
ulous cut about the flaps ! What buttons in front 
that are never meant to button, and yet are no 
ornament ! And what an exquisitely absurd pair 
"5 



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of buttons at the back ! gravely regarded, never- 
theless, and thought as indispensably necessary 
to every vs^ell-conditioned coat, as other bits of 
metal or bone are to the bodies of savages w^hom 
we laugh at. There is absolutely not one iota of 
sense, gi*ace, or even economy in the modern 
coat." 

Still more deplorable is the ceremonial hat of 
the period. That a Christian can go about un- 
abashed vs^ith a shiny black cylinder on his head 
show^s vv^hat civilization has done for us in the 
way of taste in personal decoration. The scalp- 
lock of an Apache brave has more style. When 
an Indian squaw comes into a frontier settle- 
ment the first ' ' marked -down " article she pur- 
chases is a section of stove-pipe. Her instinct 
as to the eternal fitness of things tells her that 
its proper place is on the skull of a barbarian. 

It was while revolving these pleasing reflec- 
tions in my mind, that our friend Delorme 
walked across the stage in the fourth act, and 
though there was nothing in the situation nor in 
ii6 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 
the text of the play to warrant it, I broke into 
tremendous applause, from which I desisted 
only at the scowl of an usher — an object in a 
celluloid collar and a claw-hammer coat. My 
solitary ovation to Master Delorme was an in- 
voluntary and, I think, pardonable protest against 
the male costume of our own time. 



117 



ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

EXCEPTING on the ground that youth is 
the age of vain fantasy, there is no ac- 
counting for the fact that young men and young 
women of poetical temperament should so fre- 
quently assume to look upon an early demise 
for themselves as the most desirable thing in 
the world. Though one may incidentally be 
tempted to agree with them in the abstract, one 
cannot help wondering. That persons who are 
exceptionally fortunate in their environment, and 
in private do not pretend to be otherwise, should 
openly announce their intention of retiring at 
once into the family tomb, is a problem not 
easily solved. The public has so long listened 
to these funereal solos that if a few of the poets 
thus impatient to be gone were to go, their de- 
parture would perhaps be attended by that re- 
ii8 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

signed speeding which the proverb invokes on 
behalf of the parting guest. 

The existence of at least one magazine editor 
would, I know, have a shadow lifted from it. 
At this writing, in a small mortuary basket 
under his desk are seven or eight poems of so 
gloomy a nature that he would not be able to 
remain in the same room with them if he did 
not suspect the integrity of their pessimism. 
The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable 
than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated 
sorrow. 

The Miss Gladys who sends a poem entitled 
'' Forsaken," in which she addresses death as her 
only friend, makes pictures in the editor's eyes. 
He sees, among other dissolving views, a little 
hoyden in magnificent spirits, perhaps one of 
this season's social buds, with half a score of 
lovers ready to pluck her from the family stem 
— a rose whose countless petals are coupons. A 
caramel has disagreed with her, or she would 
not have written in this despondent vein. The 
119 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

young man who seeks to inform the world in 
eleven anaemic stanzas of terze rime that the 
cup of happiness has been forever dashed from 
his lip (he appears to have but one) and darkly 
intimates that the end is ''nigh" (rhyming af- 
fably with " sigh"), will probably be engaged 
a quarter of a century from now in making simi- 
lar declarations. He is simply echoing some 
dysthymic poet of the past — reaching out with 
some other man's hat for the stray nickel of your 
sympathy. 

This morbidness seldom accompanies gen- 
uine poetic gifts. The case of David Gray, the 
young Scottish poet who died in 1861, is an in- 
stance to the contrary. His lot was exceedingly 
sad, and the failure of health just as he was on 
the verge of achieving something like success 
justified his profound melancholy ; but that he 
tuned this melancholy and played upon it, as if 
it were a musical instrument, is plainly seen in 
one of his sonnets. 



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In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's) 
*' Life and Letters of John Keats" it is related 
that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood 
upon his lips after coughing, said to his friend 
Charles Brown : " I know the color of that blood ; 
it is arterial blood ; I cannot be deceived. That 
drop is my death-warrant. I must die." Who 
that ever read the passage could forget it? David 
Gray did not, for he versified the incident as 
happening to himself and appropriated, as his 
own, Keats' s comment : 

Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain, 
There came arterial blood, and with a sigh 
Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein. 
That drop is my death-warrant; I must die. 

The incident was likely enough a personal 
experience, but the comment should have been 
placed in quotation marks. I know of few 
stranger things in literature than this poet's 
dramatization of another man's pathos. Even 
Keats's epitaph — Here lies one whose na7ne 



121 



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was writ in water — finds an echo in David 
Gray's Below lies one whose name was traced 
in sand. Poor Gray was at least the better 
prophet. 



122 



WISHMAKERS' TOWN 

\ LIMITED edition of this little volume 
-^ ^ of verse, which seems to me in many re- 
spects unique, w^as issued in 1885, and has long 
been out of print. The reissue of the book is 
in response to the desire of certain readers who 
have not forgotten the charm which William 
Young's poem exercised upon them years ago, 
and, finding the charm still potent, would have 
others share it. 

The scheme of the poem, for it is a poem 
and not simply a series of unrelated lyrics, is in- 
genious and original, and unfolds itself in mea- 
sures at once strong and delicate. The mood of 
the poet and the method of the playwright are 
obvious throughout. Wishmakers' Town — a 
Httie town situated in the no-man's-land of " The 
Tempest" and ''A Midsummer Night's Dream " 
123 



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— is shown to us as it awakens, touched by the 
dawn. The clangor of bells far and near calls 
the townfolk to their various avocations, the 
toiler to his toil, the idler to his idleness, the 
miser to his gold. In swift and picturesque se- 
quence the personages of the Masque pass be- 
fore us. Merchants, hucksters, players, lovers, 
gossips, soldiers, vagabonds, and princes crowd 
the scene, and have in turn their word of poign- 
ant speech. We mingle with the throng in the 
streets ; we hear the whir of looms and the din 
of foundries, the blare of trumpets, the whisper 
of lovers, the scandals of the market-place, and, 
in brief, are let into all the secrets of the busy 
microcosm. A contracted stage, indeed, yet 
large enough for the play of many passions, as 
the narrowest hearthstone may be. With the 
sounding of the curfew, the town is hushed to 
sleep again, and the curtain falls on this mimic 
drama of life. 

The charm of it all is not easily to be defined. 
Perhaps if one could name it, the spell were 
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broken. Above the changing rhythms hangs 
an atmosphere too evasive for measurement — an 
atmosphere that stipulates an imaginative mood 
on the part of the reader. The quality w^hich 
pleases in certain of the lyrical episodes is less 
intangible. One readily explains one's liking 
for so gracious a lyric as The Flovs^er-Seller, to 
select an example at random. Next to the plea- 
sure that lies in the w^riting of such exquisite 
verse is the pleasure of quoting it. I copy the 
stanzas partly for my ow^n gratification, and 
partly to w^in the reader to " Wishmakers' 
Town," not know^ing better how to do it. 

Myrtle, and eglantine, 

For the old love and the new I 

And the columbine, 

With its cap and bells, for folly! 

And the daffodil, for the hopes of youth I and the rue, 

For melancholy ! 

But of all the blossoms that blow, 

Fair gallants all, I charge you to win, if ye may. 

This gentle guest. 

Who dreams apart, in her wimple of purple and gray, 

Like the blessed Virgin, with meek head bending low 

Upon her breast. 

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For the orange flower 

Ye may buy as ye will : but the violet of the wood 

Is the love of maidenhood ; 

And he that hath worn it but once, though but for an hour, 

He shall never again, though he wander by many a stream, 

No, never again shall he meet with a flower that shall seem 

So sweet and pure; and forever, in after years, 

At the thought of its bloom, or the fragrance of its breath, 

The past shall arise. 

And his eyes shall be dim with tears. 

And his soul shall be far in the gardens of Paradise 

Though he stand in the shambles of death. 

In a different tone, but displaying the same 
sureness of execution, is the cry of the lowly 
folk, the wretched pawns in the great game of 
life: 

Prince, and Bishop, and Knight, and Dame, 

Plot, and plunder, and disagree ! 
O but the game is a royal game ! 

O but your tourneys are fair to see ! 

None too hopeful we found our lives ; 

Sore was labor from day to day; 
Still we strove for our babes and wives — 

Now, to the trumpet, we march away ! 

" Why ? *' — For some one hath will'd it so ! 
Nothing we know of the why or the where — 
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To swamp, or jungle, or wastes of snow — 
Nothing we know, and little we care. 

Give us to kill ! — since this is the end 
Of love and labor in Nature's plan; 

Give us to kill and ravish and rend, 
Yea, since this is the end of man. 

States shall perish, and states be born : 
Leaders, out of the throng, shall press; 

Some to honor, and some to scorn : 
We, that are little, shall yet be less. 

Over our lines shall the vultures soar; 

Hard on our flanks shall the jackals cry; 
And the dead shall be as the sands of the shore; 

And daily the living shall pray to die. 

Nay, what matter! — When' all is said, 
Prince and Bishop will plunder still: 

Lord and Lady must dance and wed. 
Pity us, pray for us, ye that will ! 

It is only the fear of impinging on Mr. 
Young's copyright that prevents me reprinting 
the graphic ballad of The Wanderer and the 
prologue of The Strollers, which reads like a page 
from the prelude to some Old-World miracle 
play. The setting of these things is frequently 
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antique, but the thought is the thought of to- 
day. I think there is a new generation of 
readers for such poetiy as Mr. Young's. I ven- 
ture the prophecy that it will not lack for them 
later when the time comes for the inevitable 
rearrangement of present poetic values. 

The author of " Wishmakers' Town" is the 
child of his period, and has not escaped thema- 
ladie du Steele, The doubt and pessimism that 
marked the end of the nineteenth century find a 
voice in the bell-like strophes with which the 
volume closes. It is the dramatist rather than 
the poet who speaks here. The real message of 
the poet to mankind is ever one of hope. Amid 
the problems that perplex and discourage, it is 
for him to sing 

Of what the world shall be 
When the years have died away. 



128 



HISTORICAL NOVELS 

IN default of such an admirable piece of work 
as Dr. Weir Mitchell's " Hugh Wynn," I 
like best those fictions which deal with king- 
doms and principalities that exist only in the 
mind's eye. One's knowledge of actual events 
and real personages runs no serious risk of re- 
ceiving shocks in this no-man's-land. Everything 
that happens in an imaginary realm — in the 
realm of Ruritania, for illustration — has an air 
of possibility, at least a shadowy vraisemblance. 
The atmosphere and local color, having an au- 
thenticity of their own, are not to be challenged. 
You cannot charge the writer with ignorance of 
the period in which his narrative is laid, since 
the period is as vague as the geography. He 
walks on safe ground, eluding many of the perils 
that beset the story-teller who ventures to stray 
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beyond the bounds of the make-believe. One 
peril he cannot escape — that of misrepresenting 
human nature. 

The anachronisms of the average historical 
novel, pretending to reflect history, are among 
its minor defects. It is a thing altogether won- 
derfully and fearfully made — the imbecile in- 
trigue, the cast-iron characters, the plumed and 
armored dialogue with its lance of gory rheto- 
ric forever at charge. The stage at its worst 
moments is not so unreal. Here art has broken 
into smithereens the mirror which she is sup- 
posed to hold up to nature. 

In this romance-world somebody is always 
somebody's unsuspected father, mother, or child, 
deceiving every one excepting the reader. Usu- 
ally the anonymous person is the hcx^o, to whom 
it is mere recreation to hold twenty swordsmen 
at bay on a staircase, killing ten or twelve of 
them before he escapes through a door that ever 
providentially opens directly behind him. How 
tired one gets of that door! The " caitiff" in 
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these chronicles of when knighthood was in 
flower is invariably hanged from " the highest 
battlement " — the second highest would not do 
at all ; or else he is thrown into ' ' the deepest 
dungeon of the castle " — the second deepest 
dungeon was never known to be used on these 
occasions. The hero habitually "cleaves" his 
foeman " to the midriff," the " midriff " being 
what the properly brought up hero always has 
in view. A certain fictional historian of my 
acquaintance makes his swashbuckler exclaim : 
' ' My sword will [shall] kiss his midriff ; " but 
that is an exceptionally lofty flight of diction. 
My friend's heroine dresses as a page, and in 
the course of long interviews with her lover re- 
mains unrecognized — a diaphanous literary in- 
vention that must have been old when the Pyra- 
mids were young. The heroine's small brother, 
with playful archaicism called " a springald," 
puts on her skirts and things and passes him- 
self off for his sister or anybody else he pleases. 
In brief, there is no puerility that is not at home 



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in this sphere of misbegotten effort. Listen — 
a priest, a princess, and a young man in woman^s 
clothes are on the scene : 

The Princess rose to her feet and 
approached the priest. 

•' Father," she said swiftly, '• this 
is not the Lady Joan, my brother's 
wife, but a youth marvelously like 
her, who hath offered himself in 
her place that she might escape. . . . 
He is the Count von Loen, a lord 
of Kernsburg. And I love him. We 
want you to marry us now, dear 
Father — now, without a moment's 
delay; for if you do not they will 
kill him, and I shall have to marry 
Prince Wasp ! " 

This is from *' Joan of the Sword Hand," and 
if ever I read a more silly performance I have 
forgotten it. 



132 



POOR YORICK 

THERE is extant in the city of New York 
an odd piece of bric-a-brac which I am 
sometimes tempted to wish was in my own 
possession. On a bracket in Edwin Booth's 
bedroom at The Players — the apartment re- 
mains as he left it that solemn June day ten 
years ago — stands a sadly dilapidated skull 
which the elder Booth, and afterward his son 
Edwin, used to soliloquize over in the grave- 
yard at Elsinore in the fifth act of " Hamlet." 

A skull is an object that always invokes 
interest more or less poignant; it always 
has its pathetic story, whether told or untold ; 
but this skull is especially a skull "with a 
past." 

In the early forties, while playing an engage- 
ment somewhere in the wild West, Junius 
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Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a 
particularly undeserving fellow, the name of 
him unknown to us. The man, as it seemed, 
was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer, 
and highwayman — in brief, a miscellaneous 
desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sort 
of person likely to touch the sympathies of the 
half -mad player. In the course of nature or the 
law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodily 
disappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist 
even as a reminiscence in the florid mind of his 
sometime benefactor. 

As the elder Booth \yas seated at breakfast 
one morning in a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, 
a negro boy entered the room bearing a small 
osier basket neatly covered with a snowy nap- 
kin. It had the general appearance of a basket 
of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as 
such it figured for a moment in Mr. Booth's 
conjecture. On lifting the cloth the actor started 
from the chair with a genuine expression on his 
features of that terror which he was used so 

'34 



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marvelously to simulate as Richard III. in the 
midnight tent-scene or as Macbeth when the 
ghost of Banquo usurped his seat at table. 

In the pretty willow-woven basket lay the 
head of Booth's old pensioner, which head the 
old pensioner had bequeathed in due legal form 
to the tragedian, begging him henceforth to 
adopt it as one of the necessary stage properties 
in the fifth act of Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy 
of "Hamlet." "Take it away, you black 
imp ! " thundered the actor to the equally aghast 
negro boy, whose curiosity had happily not 
prompted him to investigate the dark nature of 
his burden. 

Shortly afterward, however, the horse-stealer's 
residuary legatee, recovering from the first shock 
of his surprise, fell into the grim humor of the 
situation, and proceeded to carry out to the 
letter the testator's whimsical request. Thus it 
was that the skull came to secure an engage- 
ment to play the role of poor Yorick in J. B. 
Booth's company of strolling players, and to 
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continue a while longer to glimmer behind the 
footlights in the hands of his famous son. 

Observing that the grave-digger in his too 
eager realism vsras damaging the thing — the 
marks of his pick and spade are visible on the 
cranium — Edw^in Booth presently replaced it 
v^ith a papier-mache counterfeit manufactured 
in the property-room of the theatre. During 
his subsequent wanderings in Australia and 
California, he carefully preserved the relic, 
which finally found repose on the bracket in 
question. 

How often have I sat, of an afternoon, in 
that front room on the fourth floor of the club- 
house in Gramercy Park, watching the winter 
or summer twilight gradually softening and 
blurring the sharp outline of the skull until it 
vanished uncannily into the gloom ! Edwin 
Booth had forgotten, if ever he knew, the name 
of the man ; but I had no need of it in order to 
establish acquaintance with poor Yorick. In 
this association I was conscious of a deep tinge 
136 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

of sentiment on my own part, a circumstance 
not without its queerness, considering how very 
distant the acquaintance really was. 

Possibly he was a fellow of infinite jest in his 
day ; he was sober enough now, and in no way 
disposed to indulge in those flashes of merri- 
ment " that were wont to set the table on a 
roar." But I did not regret his evaporated 
hilarity ; I liked his more befitting genial si- 
lence, and had learned to look upon his rather 
open countenance with the same friendliness as 
that with which I regarded the faces of less 
phantasmal members of the club. He had be- 
come to me a dramatic personality as distinct as 
that of any of the Thespians I met in the grill- 
room or the library. 

Yorick's feeling in regard to me was a sub- 
ject upon which I frequently speculated. There 
was at intervals an alert gleam of intelligence 
in those cavernous eye-sockets, as if the sudden 
remembrance of some old experience had illu- 
mined them. He had been a great traveler, and 
137 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

had known strange vicissitudes in life ; his stage 
career had brought him into contact with a 
varied assortment of men and women, and ex- 
tended his horizon. His more peaceful profes- 
sion of holding up mail-coaches on lonely roads 
had surely not been without incident. It was 
inconceivable that all this had left no Impres- 
sions. He must have had at least a faint recol- 
lection of the tempestuous Junius Brutus Booth. 
That Yorick had formed his estimate of me, and 
probably not a flattering one, is something of 
which I am strongly convinced. 

At the death of Edwin Booth, poor Yorick 
passed out of my personal cognizance, and now 
lingers an incongruous shadow amid the mem- 
ories of the precious things I lost then. 

The suite of apartments formerly occupied by 
Edwin Booth at The Players has been, as I have 
said, kept unchanged — a shrine to which from 
time to time some loving heart makes silent 
pilgrimage. On a table in the centre of his 
bedroom lies the book just where he laid it 

138 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

down, an ivory paper-cutter marking the page 
his eyes last rested upon ; and in this chamber, 
with its familiar pictures, pipes, and ornaments, 
the skull finds its proper sanctuary. If at odd 
moments I wish that by chance poor Yorick 
had fallen to my care, the wish is only half- 
hearted, though had that happened, I would 
have given him welcome to the choicest corner 
in my study and tenderly cherished him for the 
sake of one who comes no more. 



139 



THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER 

One that gathers samphire, dreadful trade ! — King Lear. 

THE material for this paper on the auto- 
graph hunter, his ways and his manners, 
has been drawn chiefly from experiences not 
my own. My personal relations with him have 
been comparatively restricted, a circumstance 
to which I owe the privilege of treating the 
subject with a freedom that might otherwise not 
seem becoming. 

No author is insensible to the compliment in- 
volved in a request for his autograph, assuming 
the request to come from some sincere lover of 
books and bookmen. It is an affair of different 
complection when he is importuned to give time 
and attention to the innumerable unknown who 
" collect^" autographs as they would collect post- 
140 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

age stamps, with no interest in the matter be- 
yond the desire to accumulate as many as possi- 
ble. The average autograph hunter, with his 
purposeless insistence, reminds one of the queen 
in Stockton's story whose fad was ' ' the button- 
holes of all nations." 

In our population of eighty millions and up- 
ward there are probably two hundred thousand 
persons interested more or less in what is termed 
the literary world. This estimate is absurdly 
low, but it serves to cast a sufficient side-light 
upon the situation. Now, any unit of these two 
hundred thousand is likely at any moment to in- 
dite a letter to some favorite novelist, historian, 
poet, or what not. It will be seen, then, that 
the autograph hunter is no inconsiderable per- 
son. He has made it embarrassing work for the 
author fortunate or unfortunate enough to be re- 
garded as worth while. Every mail adds to his 
reproachful pile of unanswered letters. If he 
have a conscience, and no amanuensis, he quickly 
finds himself tangled in the meshes of endless 
141 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

and futile correspondence. Through policy, 
good nature, or vanity he is apt to become facile 
prey. 

A certain literary collector once confessed in 
print that he always studied the idiosyncrasies 
of his " subject" as carefully as another sort of 
collector studies the plan of the house to which 
he meditates a midnight visit. We were as- 
sured that with skillful preparation and adroit 
approach an autograph could be extracted from 
anybody. According to the revelations of the 
writer, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, and Mr. 
Gladstone had their respective point of easy 
access — their one unfastened door or window, 
metaphorically speaking. The strongest man 
has his weak side. 

Dr. Holmes's affability in replying to every 
one who wrote to him was perhaps not a trait 
characteristic of the elder group. Mr. Lowell, 
for instance, was harder-hearted and rather diffi- 
cult to reach. I recall one day in the library at 
Elm wood. As I was taking down a volume 
142 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

from the shelf a sealed letter escaped from the 
pages and fluttered to my feet. I handed it to 
Mr. Lowell, who glanced incuriously at the 
superscription. " Oh, yes," he said, smiling, 
*' I know 'em by instinct." Relieved of its en- 
velope, the missive turned out to be eighteen 
months old, and began with the usual amusing 
solecism: "As one of the most famous of 
American authors I would like to possess 3'our 
autograph." 

Each recipient of such requests has of course 
his own way of responding. Mr. Whittier used 
to be obliging ; Mr. Longfellow politic ; Mr. 
Emerson, always philosophical, dreamily con- 
fiscated the postage stamps. 

Time was when the collector contented him- 
self with a signature on a card ; but that, I am 
told, no longer satisfies. He must have a letter 
addressed to him personally — * ' on any subject 
you please," as an immature scribe lately sug- 
gested to an acquaintance of mine. The in- 
genuous youth purposed to flourish a letter in the 

H3 



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faces of his less fortunate competitors, in order 
to show them that he was on familiar terms with 
the celebrated So-and-So. This or a kindred 
motive is the spur to many a collector. The 
stratagems he employs to compass his end are 
inexhaustible. He drops you an off-hand note 
to inquire in what year you first published your 
beautiful poem entitled " A Psalm of Life." If 
you are a simple soul, you hasten to assure him 
that you are not the author of that poem, which 
he must have confused with your ' ' Rime of the 
Ancient Mariner" — and there you are. Another 
expedient is to ask if your father's middle name 
was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has 
probably been dead many years, and as perhaps 
he was not a public man in his day, you are 
naturally touched that any one should have in- 
terest in him after this long flight of time. In 
the innocence of your heart you reply by the 
next mail that your father's middle name was 
not Hierophilus, but Epaminondas — and there 
you are again. It is humiliating to be caught 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 

swinging, like a simian ancestor, on a branch 
of one's genealogical tree. 

Some morning you find beside your plate at 
breakfast an imposing parchment with a great 
gold seal in the upper left-hand corner. This 
document — I am relating an actual occurrence 
— announces with a flourish that you have unan- 
imously been elected an honorary member of 
The Kalamazoo International Literary Associa- 
tion. Possibly the honor does not take away 
your respiration ; but you are bound by courtesy 
to make an acknowledgment, and you express 
your insincere thanks to the obliging secretary 
of a literary organization which does not exist 
an)rwhere on earth. 

A scheme of lighter creative touch is that of 
the correspondent who advises you that he is 
replenishing his library and desires a detailed 
list of your works, with the respective dates of 
their first issue, price, style of binding, etc. A 
bibliophile, you say to yourself. These inter- 
rogations should of course have been addressed 

H5 



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to your publisher ; but they are addressed to 
you, with the stereotyped " thanks in advance." 
The natural inference is that the correspondent, 
who writes in a brisk commercial vein, wishes 
to fill out his collection of your books, or, pos- 
sibly, to treat himself to a complete set in full 
crushed Levant. Eight or ten months later this 
individual, having forgotten (or hoping you 
will not remember) that he has already de- 
manded a chronological list of your writings, 
forwards another application couched in the 
self -same words. The length of time it takes 
him to ''replenish" his library (with your 
books) strikes you as pathetic. You cannot 
control your emotions sufficiently to pen a 
reply. From a purely literary point of view 
this gentleman cares nothing whatever for your 
holograph ; from a mercantile point of view 
he cares greatly and likes to obtain duplicate 
specimens, which he disposes of to dealers in 
such frail merchandise. 

The pseudo-journalist who is engaged in 
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PONKAPOG PAPERS 

preparing a critical and biographical sketch of 
you, and wants to incorporate, if possible, some 
slight hitherto unnoted event in your life — a 
signed photograph and a copy of your book- 
plate are here in order — is also a character 
which periodically appears upon the scene. In 
this little Comedy of Deceptions there are as 
many players as men have fancies. 

A brother slave-of-the-lamp permits me to 
transfer this leaf from the book of his experi- 
ence : " Not long ago the postman brought me 
a letter of a rather touching kind. The unknown 
writer, lately a widow, and plainly a woman of 
refinement, had just suffered a new affliction in 
the loss of her little girl. My correspondent 
asked me to copy for her ten or a dozen lines 
from a poem which I had written years before 
on the death of a child. The request was so 
shrinkingly put, with such an appealing air of 
doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately 
transcribed the entire poem, a matter of a hun- 
dred lines or so, and sent it to her. I am unable 
H1 



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to this day to decide whether I was wholly hurt 
or wholly amused when, two months afterward, 
I stumbled over my manuscript, with a neat 
price attached to it, in a second-hand book- 
shop." 

Perhaps the most distressing feature of the 
whole business is the very poor health which 
seems to prevail among autograph hunters. No 
other class of persons in the community shows 
so large a percentage of confirmed invalids. 
There certainly is some mysterious connection 
between incipient spinal trouble and the col- 
lecting of autographs. Which superinduces the 
other is a question for pathology. It is a fact 
that one out of every eight applicants for a 
specimen of penmanship bases his or her claim 
upon the possession of some vertebral disability 
which leaves him or her incapable of doing 
anything but write to authors for their auto- 
graph. Why this particular diversion should be 
the sole resource remains undisclosed. But so 
it appears to be, and the appeal to one's sympa- 

148 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

thy is most direct and persuasive. Personally, 
however, I have my suspicions, suspicions that 
are shared by several men of letters, w^ho have 
come to regard this plea of invalidism, in the 
majority of cases, as simply the variation of a 
very old and familiar tune. I firmly believe 
that the health of autograph hunters, as a class, 
is excellent. 



149 



ROBERT HERRICK 
4. 



ROBERT HERRICK 



A LITTLE over three hundred years ago 
England had given to her a poet of the 
very rarest lyrical quality, but she did not dis- 
cover the fact for more than a hundred and 
fifty years afterward. The poet himself w^as 
aware of the fact at once, and stated it, perhaps 
not too modestly, in countless quatrains and 
couplets, w^hich were not read, or, if read, w^ere 
not much regarded at the moment. It has al- 
ways been an incredulous world in this matter. 
So many poets have announced their arrival, 
and not arrived ! 

Robert Herrick was descended in a direct 
line from an ancient family in Lincolnshire, the 
Eyricks, a mentionable representative of which 



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was John Eyrick of Leicester, the poet's grand- 
father, admitted freeman in 1535, and afterward 
twice made mayor of the town. John Eyrick 
or Heyricke — he spelled his name recklessly — 
had five sons, the second of which sought a 
career in London, where he became a gold- 
smith, and in December, 1582, married Julian 
Stone, spinster, of Bedfordshire, a sister to 
Anne, Lady Soame, the wife of Sir Stephen 
Soame. One of the many children of this mar- 
riage was Robert Herrick. 

It is the common misfortune of the poet's 
biographers, though it was the poet's own great 
good fortune, that the personal interviewer was 
an unknown quantity at the period when Her- 
rick played his part on the stage of life. Of 
that performance, in its intimate aspects, we 
have only the slightest record. 

Robert Herrick was born in Wood street, 
Cheapside, London, in 1591, and baptized at 
St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, on August 24 of that 
year. He had several brothers and sisters, with 



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whom we shall not concern ourselves. It would 
be idle to add the little we know about these 
persons to the little we know about Herrick 
himself. He is a sufficient problem without 
dragging in the rest of the family. 

When the future lyrist was fifteen months old 
his father, Nicholas Herrick, made his will, 
and immediately fell out of an upper win- 
dow. Whether or not this fall was an intended 
sequence to the will, the high almoner. Dr. 
Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, promptly put in 
his claim to the estate, " all goods and chattels 
of suicides" becoming his by law. The cir- 
cumstances were suspicious, though not conclu- 
sive, and the good bishop, after long litigation, 
consented to refer the case to arbitrators, who 
awarded him two hundred and twenty pounds, 
thus leaving the question at issue — whether or 
not Herrick's death had been his own premedi- 
tated act — still wrapped in its original mystery. 
This singular law, which had the possible effect 
of inducing high almoners to encourage suicide 
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among well-to-do persons of the lower and 
middle classes, was afterward rescinded. 

Nicholas Herrick did not leave his household 
destitute, for his estate amounted to five thousand 
pounds, that is to say, twenty-five thousand 
pounds in to-day's money ; but there were many 
mouths to feed. The poet's two uncles, Robert 
Herrick and William Herrick of Beaumanor, 
the latter subsequently knighted ^ for his useful- 
ness as jeweller and money-lender to James I., 
were appointed guardians to the children. 

Young Robert appears to have attended school 
in Westminster until his fifteenth year, when 
he was apprenticed to Sir William, who had 
learned the gentle art of goldsmith from his 
nephew's father. Though Robert's indentures 

1 Dr. Grosart, in his interesting and valuable Memorial-Intro- 
duction to Herrick's poems, quotes this curious item from Win- 
wood' s Memorials of Afairs of Siate: "On EasterTuesday [1605], 
one Mr. William Herrick, a goldsmith in Cheapside, was Knighted 
for making a Hole in the great Diamond the King doth wear. The 
party little expected the honour, but he did his work so well as 
won the King to an extraordinary liking of it." 

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bound him for ten years, Sir William is sup- 
posed to have offered no remonstrance when he 
was asked, long before that term expired, to 
cancel the engagement and allow Robert to enter 
Cambridge, which he did as fellow-commoner 
at St. John's College. At the end of two years 
he transferred himself to Trinity Hall, with a 
view to economy and the pursuit of the law — 
the two frequently go together. He received 
his degree of B. A. in 1617, and his M. A. in 
1620, having relinquished the law for the arts. 
During this time he was assumed to be in 
receipt of a quarterly allowance of ten pounds — 
a not illiberal provision, the pound being then 
five times its present value ; but as the payments 
were eccentric, the master of arts was in recur- 
rent distress. If this money came from his own 
share of his father's estate, as seems likely, 
Herrick had cause for complaint ; if otherwise, 
the pith is taken out of his grievance. 

The Iliad of his financial woes at this juncture 
is told in a few chance -preserved letters written 
157 



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to his "most careful uncle," as he calls that 
evidently thrifty person. In one of these mono- 
tonous and dreary epistles, which are signed 
" R. Hearick," the writer says : " The essence 
of my writing is (as heretofore) to entreat you 
to paye for my use to Mr. Arthour Johnson, 
bookseller, in Panic's Churchyarde, the ordi- 
narie sume of tenn pounds, and that with as 
much sceleritie as you maye." He also indulges 
in the natural wish that his college bills "had 
leaden wings and tortice feet." This was in 
1617. The young man's patrimony, whatever 
it may have been, had dwindled, and he con- 
fesses to " many a throe and pinches of the 
purse." For the moment, at least, his prospects 
were not flattering. 

Robert Herrick's means of livelihood, when 
in 1630 he quitted the university and went up to 
London, are conjectural. It is clear that he was 
not without some resources, since he did not 
starve to death on his wits before he discovered 
a patron in the Earl of Pembroke. In the court 

158 



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circle Herrick also unearthed humbler, but per- 
haps not less useful, allies in the persons of 
Edward Norgate, clerk of the signet, and Master 
John Crofts, cup-bearer to the king. Through 
the two New Year anthems, honored by the 
music of Henry Lawes, his Majesty's organist 
at Westminster, it is more than possible that 
Herrick was brought to the personal notice of 
Charles and Henrietta Maria. All this was a 
promise of success, but not success itself. It 
has been thought probable that Herrick may 
have secured some minor office in the chapel 
at Whitehall. That would accord with his sub- 
sequent appointment (September, 1627,) as 
chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham's unfortu- 
nate expedition of the Isle of Rhe. 

Precisely when Herrick was invested with 
holy orders is not ascertainable. If one may 
draw an inference from his poems, the life he 
led meanwhile was not such as his '' most care- 
ful uncle " would have warmly approved. The 
literary clubs and coffee-houses of the day were 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

open to a free-lance like young Herrick, some 
of whose blithe measures, passing in manuscript 
from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to 
light as a poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun 
were not places devoted to worship, unless it 
were to the worship of " rare Ben Jonson," at 
whose feet Herrick now sat, with the other 
blossoming young poets of the season. He was 
a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed 
many loving lyrics to the master, of which not 
the least graceful is His Prayer to Ben Jonson : 

When I a verse shall make, 
Know I have praid thee 
For old religion's sake, 
Saint Ben, to aide me. 

Make the way smooth for me. 
When I, thy Herrick, 
Honouring thee, on my knee 
Offer my lyric. 

Candles I '11 give to thee, 
And a new altar; 
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be 
Writ in my Psalter. 

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On September 30, 1629, Charles I., at the 
recommending of the Earl of Exeter, presented 
Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near 
Totnes, in Devonshire. Here he was destined 
to pass the next nineteen years of his life among 
surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be 
a mile away from London stone was for Herrick 
to be in exile. Even with railway and tele- 
graphic interruptions from the outside world, 
the dullness of a provincial English town of to- 
day is something formidable. The dullness of a 
sequestered English hamlet in the early part of 
the seventeenth century must have been appall- 
ing. One is dimly conscious of a belated throb 
of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however 
discontented or unhappy he may have been at 
first in that lonely vicarage, the world may con- 
gratulate itself on the circumstances that stranded 
him there, far from the distractions of the town, 
and with no other solace than his Muse, for there 
it was he wrote the greater number of the poems 
which were to make his fame. It is to this acci- 
161 



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dental banishment to Devon that we owe the 
cluster of exquisite pieces descriptive of obso- 
lete rural manners and customs — the Christ- 
mas masks, the Twelfth-night mummeries, the 
morris-dances, and the May-day festivals. 

The November following Herrick's appoint- 
ment to the benefice was marked by the death 
of his mother, who left him no heavier legacy 
than "a ringe of twenty shillings." Perhaps 
this was an understood arrangement between 
them ; but it is to be observed that, though Her- 
rick was a spendthrift in epitaphs, he wasted no 
funeral lines on Julian Herrick. In the matter 
of verse he dealt generously with his family 
down to the latest nephew. One of his most 
charming and touching poems is entitled To 
His Dying Brother, Master William Herrick, 
a posthumous son. There appear to have been 
two brothers named William. The younger, 
who died early, is supposed to be referred to 
here. 

The story of Herrick's existence at Dean Prior 
162 



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is as vague- and bare of detail as the rest of the 
narrative. His parochial duties must have been 
irksome to him, and it is to be imagined that he 
w^ore his cassock lightly. As a preparation for 
ecclesiastical life he forsv^ore sack and poetry ; 
but presently he w^as with the Muse again, and 
his farewell to sack was in a strictly Pickwickian 
sense. Herrick had probably accepted the vicar- 
ship as he would have accepted a lieutenancy in 
a troop of horse — with an eye to present emol- 
ument and future promotion. The promotion 
never came, and the emolument was nearly as 
scant as that of Goldsmith's parson, who con- 
sidered himself " passing rich with forty pounds 
a year" — a height of optimism beyond the 
reach of Herrick, with his expensive town wants 
and habits. But fifty pounds — the salary of his 
benefice — and possible perquisites in the way 
of marriage and burial fees would enable him to 
live for the time being. It was better than a 
possible nothing a year in London. 

Herrick's religious convictions were assuredly 
163 



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not deeper than those of the average layman. 
Various writers have taken a different view of 
the subject ; but it is inconceivable that a clergy- 
man with a fitting sense of his function could 
have written certain of the poems w^hich Her- 
rick afterward gave to the world — those aston- 
ishing epigrams upon his rustic enemies, and 
those habitual bridal compliments which, among 
his personal friends, must have added a terror 
to matrimony. Had he written only in that vein, 
the posterity which he so often invoked with 
pathetic confidence would not have greatly 
troubled itself about him. 

It cannot positively be asserted that all the 
verses in question relate to the period of his in- 
cumbency, for none of his verse is dated, with 
the exception of the Dialogue betwixt Horace 
and Lydia. The date of some of the composi- 
tions may be arrived at by induction. The re- 
ligious pieces grouped under the title of Noble 
Numbers distinctly associate themselves with 
Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Veiy 
164 



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few of them are "born of the royal blood." 
They lack the inspiration and magic of his secu- 
lar poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and 
grotesque as to stir a suspicion touching the ab- 
solute soundness of Herrick's mind at all times. 
The lines in which the Supreme Being is as- 
sured that he may read Herrick's poems with- 
out taking any tincture from their sinfulness 
might have been written in a retreat for the un- 
balanced. " For unconscious impiety," remarks 
Mr. Edmund Gosse,^ " this rivals the famous 
passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted 
God to ' pause and think.' " Elsewhere, in an 
apostrophe to " Heaven," Herrick says : 

Let mercy be 
So kind to set me free, 

And I will straight 
Come in, or force the gate. 

In any event, the poet did not purpose to be 
left out ! 

Relative to the inclusion of unworthy pieces 

1 In Seventeenth-Century Studies, 

165 



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and the general absence of arrangement in the 
*'Hesperides," Dr. Grosart advances the theoiy 
that the printers exercised arbitrary authority on 
these points. Dr. Grosart assumes that Herrick 
kept the epigrams and personal tributes in 
manuscript books separate from the rest of the 
work, which would have made a too slender 
volume by itself, and on the plea of this slender- 
ness was induced to trust the two collections 
to the publisher, ' ' whereupon he or some un- 
skilled subordinate proceeded to intermix these 
additions with the others. That the poet him- 
self had nothing to do with the arrangement or 
disarrangement lies on the surface." This is an 
amiable supposition, but merely a supposition. 
Herrick personally placed the "copy" in the 
hands of John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 
and if he were over-persuaded to allow them 
to print unfit verses, and to observe no method 
whatever in the contents of the book, the dis- 
credit is none the less his. It is charitable to 
believe that Herrick's coarseness was not the 
i66 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

coarseness of the man, but of the time, and that 
he followed the fashion malgre lui. With re- 
gard to the fairy poems, they certainly should 
have been given in sequence ; but if there are 
careless printers, there are also authors w^ho are 
careless in the arrangement of their manuscript, 
a kind of task, moreover, in w^hich Herrick was 
wholly unpractised, and might easily have made 
mistakes. The "Hesperides" was his sole 
publication. 

Herrick was now thirty-eight years of age. 
Of his personal appearance at this time we have 
no description. The portrait of him prefixed to 
the original edition of his works belongs to a 
much later moment. Whether or not the bovine 
features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on 
the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has 
not laid its erasing finger on that singularly un- 
pleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interest^ 
ing to note that this same Marshall engraved the, 
head of Milton for the first collection of his mis^ 
cellaneous poems — the precious 1645 volume 
167 



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containing II Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, etc. 
The plate gave great offense to the serious- 
minded young Milton, not only because it re- 
presented him as an elderly person, but because 
of certain minute figures of peasant lads and 
lassies who are very indistinctly seen dancing 
frivolously under the trees in the background. 
Herrick had more reason to protest. The ag- 
gressive face bestov^ed upon him by the artist 
lends a tone of veracity to the tradition that the 
vicar occasionally hurled the manuscript of his 
sermon at the heads of his drovs^sy parishioners, 
accompanying the missive w^ith pregnant re- 
marks. He has the aspect of one meditating 
assault and battery. 

To offset the picture there is much indirect 
testimony to the amiability of the man, aside 
from the evidence furnished by his own writ- 
ings. He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the 
Bishop of Lincoln's imprisonment — a poem full 
of deference and tenderness for a person who 
had evidently injured the writer, probably by 
i68 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

opposing him in some affair of church prefer- 
ment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick " be- 
came much beloved by the gentry in these parts 
for his florid and witty (wise) discourses." It 
appears that he was fond of animals, and had a 
pet spaniel called Tracy, which did not get away 
without a couplet attached to him : 

Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see 
For shape and service spaniell like to thee. 

Among the exile's chance acquaintances was a 
sparrow, whose elegy he also sings, comparing 
the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's 
disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans. 
On the authority of Dorothy King, the daughter 
of a woman who served Herrick's successor at 
Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet 
kept a pig, which he had taught to drink out of 
a tankard — a kind of instruction he was admir- 
ably qualified to impart. Dorothy was in her 
ninety-ninth year when she communicated this 
fact to Mr. Barron Field, the author of the 
paper on Herrick published in the " Quarterly 

169 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

Review" for August, 1810, and in the Boston 
edition^ of the " Hesperides " attributed to 
Southey. 

What else do we know of the vicar? A very 
favorite theme with Herrick was Herrick. Scat- 
tered through his book are no fewer than twenty- 
five pieces entitled On Himself, not to men- 
tion numberless autobiographical hints under 
other captions. They are merely hints, throw- 
ing casual side-lights on his likes and dislikes, 
and illuminating his vanity. A whimsical per- 
sonage without any very definite outlines might 
be evolved from these fragments. I picture him 
as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with perhaps less 
quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. 
Like the prince of gossips, too, he somehow 
gets at your affections. In one place Herrick 

1 The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The British 
Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and chronologi- 
cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as living " in habits 
of intimacy " with Ben Jonson in 1648. If that was the case, Her- 
rick must have taken up his quarters in Westminster Abbey, for 
Jonson had been dead eleven years. 
170 



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laments the threatened failure of his eyesight 
(quite in what would have been Pepys's man- 
ner had Pepys written verse), and in another 
place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The 
quatrain treating of this latter catastrophe is as 
fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's concetti: 

One of the five straight branches of my hand 
Is lopt already, and the rest but stand 
Expecting when to fall, which soon will be : 
First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree. 

With all his great show of candor Herrick really 
reveals as little of himself as ever poet did. One 
thing, however, is manifest — he understood and 
loved music. None but a lover could have said : 

The mellow touch of musick most doth wound 
The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound. 

Or this to Julia : 

So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice. 
As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise, 
But listen to thee walking in thy chamber 
Melting melodious words to lutes of amber. 

. . . Then let me lye 
Entranc'd, and lost confusedly; 
171 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

And by thy musick stricken mute, 
Die, and be turn'd into a lute. 

Herrick never married. His modest Devon- 
shire establishment was managed by a maid- 
servant named Prudence Baldwin. '' Fate likes 
fine names," says Lowell. That of Herrick's 
maid-of -all-work was certainly a happy meeting 
of gentle vowels and consonants, and has had 
the good fortune to be embalmed in the amber 
of what may be called a joyous little threnody : 

In this little urne is laid 
Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid; 
From whose happy spark here let 
Spring the purple violet. 

Herrick addressed a number of poems to her 
before her death, which seems to have deeply 
touched him in his loneliness. We shall not al- 
low a pleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flip- 
pancy of an old writer who says that '' Prue was 
but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse." 
She was a faithful handmaid, and had the merit 
of causing Herrick in this octave to strike a note 
of sincerity not usual with him : 
172 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

These summer-birds did with thy master stay 
The times of warmth, but then they flew away, 
Leaving their poet, being now grown old, 
Expos'd to all the coming winter's cold. 
But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide 
As well the winter's as the summer's tide : 
For which thy love, live with thy master here 
Not two, but all the seasons of the year. 

Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mis- 
tress Prew ! 

In spite of Herrick's disparagement of Dean- 
bourn, which he calls '' a rude river," and 
his characterization of Devon folk as " a peo- 
ple currish, churlish as the seas,'* the fullest 
and pleasantest days of his life were prob- 
ably spent at Dean Prior. He was not un- 
mindful meanwhile of the gathering political 
storm that was to shake England to its foun- 
dations. How anxiously, in his solitude, he 
watched the course of events, is attested by 
many of his poems. This solitude was not 
without its compensation. " I confess," he 
says, 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

I ne'er invented such 
Ennobled numbers for the presse 
Than where I loath'd so much. 

A man is never wholly unhappy when he is 
writing verses. Herrick was firmly convinced 
that each new lyric was a stone added to the 
pillar of his fame, and perhaps his sense of 
relief was tinged with indefinable regret when 
he found himself suddenly deprived of his bene- 
fice. The integrity of some of his royalistic 
poems is doubtful ; but he was not given the 
benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament, 
which ejected the panegyrist of young Prince 
Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior, and 
installed in his place the venerable John Syms, 
a gentleman with pronounced Cromwellian 
views. 

Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers 
at the Puritans, discarded his clerical habili- 
ments, and hastened to London to pick up such 
as were left of the gay-colored threads of his 
old experience there. Once more he would 
174 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he 
would breathe the air breathed by such poets 
and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden, 
and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and gin- 
ger shall be hot i' the mouth too." In the 
gladness of getting back "from the dull con- 
fines of the drooping west," he writes a glow- 
ing apostrophe to London — that ' ' stony step- 
mother to poets." He claims to be a free-born 
Roman, and is proud to find himself a citizen 
again. According to his earlier biographers, 
Herrick had much ado not to starve in that 
same longed-for London, and fell into great 
misery ; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, 
with justness, that Herrick's family, which was 
wealthy and influential, would not have allowed 
him to come to abject want. With his royal- 
istic tendencies he may not have breathed quite 
freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth, 
and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, 
but among them was not poverty. 

The poet was now engaged in preparing his 
^75 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

works for the press, and a few weeks following 
his return to London they were issued in a sin- 
gle volume with the title '^Hesperides ; or, The 
Works both Humane and Divine of Robert 
Herrick, Esq." 

The time was not ready for him. A new era 
had dawned — the era of the commonplace. 
The interval was come when Shakespeare him- 
self was to lie in a kind of twilight. Herrick 
was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had strayed 
by chance into an artificial and prosaic age — 
a sylvan singing creature alighting on an alien 
planet. '' He was too natural," says Mr. Pal- 
grave in his Chrysomela, " too purely poetical ; 
he had not the learned polish, the political al- 
lusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, 
which were then and onward demanded from 
poetry." Yet it is strange that a public which 
had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect 
a poet who was fifty times finer than Waller 
in his own specialty. What poet then, or in the 
half-century that followed the Restoration, could 
176 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

have written Corinna's Going a-Maying, or ap- 
proached in kind the ineffable grace and perfec- 
tion to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics ? 

The " Hesperides " was received with chilling 
indifference. None of Herrick's great contem- 
poraries has left a consecrating word concerning 
it. The book was not reprinted during the au- 
thor's lifetime, and for more than a century after 
his death Herrick was virtually unread. In 1 796 
the " Gentleman's Magazine" copied a few of 
the poems, and two years later Dr. Nathan Drake 
published in his '' Literaiy Hours " three critical 
papers on the poet, with specimens of his writ- 
ings. Dr. Johnson omitted him from the "Lives 
of the Poets," though space was found for half a 
score of poetasters whose names are to be found 
nowhere else. In 18 10 Dr. Nott, a physician 
of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections. 
It was not until 1833 that Herrick was reprinted 
in full. It remained for the taste of our own 
day to multiply editions of him. 

In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it 

177 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

is now only needful that some wiseacre should 
attribute the authorship of the poems to some 
man who could not possibly have written a line 
of them. The opportunity presents attractions 
that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a hand- 
ful of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap 
of his manuscript extant ; the men who drank 
and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple 
Tun make no reference to him ; ^ and in the wide 
parenthesis formed by his birth and death we 
find as little tangible incident as is discover- 
able in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty- 
two years. Here is material for profundity and 
ciphers ! 

Herrick's second sojourn in London covered 
the period between 1648 and 1662, during which 
interim he fades from sight, excepting for the 

1 With the single exception of the writer of some verses in the 
Musarum Delicia (1656) who mentions 

That old sack 
Young Herrick took to entertain 
The Muses in a sprightly vein. 

178 



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instant when he is publishing his book. If he 
engaged in further literary work there are no 
evidences of it beyond one contribution to the 
" Lacrym^e Musainim" in 1649. 

He seems to have had lodgings, for a while 
at least, in St. Anne's, Westminster. With the 
court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated 
in the seats of the mighty, it was no longer the 
merry London of his early manhood. Time and 
war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the 
old haunts the old familiar faces were wanting. 
Ben Jonson was dead, Waller banished, and 
many another comrade '' in disgrace with for- 
tune and men's eyes." As Herrick walked 
through crowded Cheapside or along the dingy 
river-bank in those years, his thought must have 
turned more than once to the little vicarage in 
Devonshire, and lingered tenderly. 

On the accession of Charles II. a favorable 

change of wind wafted Herrick back to his 

former moorings at Dean Prior, the obnoxious 

Syms having been turned adrift. This occurred 

179 



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on August 24, 1662, the seventy -first anniver- 
saiy of the poet's baptism. Of Herrick's move- 
ments after that, tradition does not furnish even 
the shadow^ of an outUne. The only notable 
event concerning him is recorded twelve years 
later in the parish register : "Robert Herrick, 
vicker, vs^as buried ye 15" day October, 1674." 
He vs^as eighty-three years old. The location of 
his grave is unknown. In 1857 a monument to 
his memory was erected in Dean Church. And 
this is all. 



180 



II 



The details that have come down to us touch- 
ing Herrick's private life are as meagre as if he 
had been a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. But 
were they as ample as could be desired they 
would still be unimportant compared with the 
single fact that in 1648 he gave to the world his 
" Hesperides." The environments of the man 
w^ere accidental and transitory. The significant 
part of him we have, and that is enduring so 
long as wit, fancy, and melodious numbers hold 
a charm for mankind. 

A fine thing incomparably said instantly be- 
comes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of 
dateless excellence. Though it may have been 
said three hundred years ago, it is as modern 
as yesterday ; though it may have been said 
yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have 
181 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

been always in our keeping. This quality of 
remoteness and nearness belongs, in a striking 
degree, to Herrick's poems. They are as novel 
to-day as they were on the lips of a choice few 
of his contemporaries, who, in reading them in 
their freshness, must surely have been aware 
here and there of the ageless grace of old idyllic 
poets dead and gone. 

Herrick was the bearer of no heavy message 
to the world, and such message as he had he 
was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On this 
point he somewhere says : 

Let others to the printing presse run fast ; 
Since after death comes glory, I '11 not haste. 

He had need of his patience, for he was long 
detained on the road by many of those obstacles 
that waylay poets on their journeys to the 
printer. 

Herrick was nearly sixty years old when he 

published the '* Hesperides." It was, I repeat, 

no heavy message, and the bearer was left an 

unconscionable time to cool his heels in the ante- 

182 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

chamber. Though his pieces had been set to 
music by such composers as Lawes, Ramsay, 
and Laniers, and his court poems had naturally 
won favor with the Cavalier party, Herrick cut 
but a small figure at the side of several of his 
rhyming contemporaries who are now forgotten. 
It sometimes happens that the light love-song, 
reaching few or no ears at its first singing, out- 
lasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which, 
dealing with some passing phase of thought, 
social or political, gains the instant applause of 
the multitude. In most cases the timely ode is 
somehow apt to fade with the circumstance that 
inspired it, and becomes the yesterday's edito- 
rial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to 
get hold of occasional poems. That makes it 
hard for feeble poets laureate. 

Mr. Henry James once characterized Al- 
phonse Daudet as "a great little novelist." 
Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brev- 
ity of his poems, for he wrote nothing de longue 
haleine^ would place him among the minor 

183 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

singers ; his workmanship places him among 
the masters. The Herricks were not a family 
of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The 
accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and 
costly metals was one of the gifts transmitted to 
Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as ex- 
quisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger- 
hilt by Cellini ; the line has nearly always that 
vine-like fluency which seems impromptu, and 
is never the result of anything but austere labor. 
The critic who, borrowing Milton's words, 
described these carefully wrought poems as 
''wood-notes wild" showed a singular lapse of 
penetration. They are full of subtle simplicity. 
Here we come across a stanza as severely cut as 
an antique cameo — the stanza, for instance, in 
which the poet speaks of his lady-love's ' ' win- 
ter face " — and there a couplet that breaks into 
unfading daffodils and violets. The art, though 
invisible, is always there. His amatory songs 
and catches are such poetry as Orlando would 
have liked to hang on the boughs in the forest 
1 84 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

of Arden. None of the work is hastily done, 
not even that portion of it we could wish had 
not been done at all. Be the motive grave or 
gay, it is given that faultlessness of form which 
distinguishes everything in literature that has 
survived its own period. There is no such thing 
as "form" alone; it is only the close-grained 
material that takes the highest finish. The struc- 
ture of Herrick's verse, like that of Blake, is 
simple to the verge of innocence. Such rhyth- 
mic intricacies as those of Shelley, Tennyson, 
and Swinburne he never dreamed of. But his 
manner has this perfection : it fits his matter as 
the cup of the acorn fits its meat. 

Of passion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has 
little or none. Here are no "tears from the 
depth of some divine despair," no probings into 
the tragic heart of man, no insight that goes 
much farther than the pathos of a cowslip on a 
maiden's grave. The tendrils of his verse reach 
up to the light, and love the warmer side of the 
garden wall. But the reader who does not de- 

185 



PONKAPOG PAPERS 

tect the seriousness under the lightness misreads 
Herrick. Nearly all true poets have been whole- 
some and joyous singers. A pessimistic poet, 
like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature's sar- 
casms. In his own bright pastoral way Herrick 
must always remain unexcelled. His limitations 
are certainly narrow, but they leave him in the 
sunshine. Neither in his thought nor in his 
utterance is there any complexity ; both are as 
pellucid as a woodland pond, content to du- 
plicate the osiers and ferns, and, by chance, 
the face of a girl straying near its crystal. His 
is no troubled stream in which large trout 
are caught. He must be accepted on his own 
terms. 

The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions, 
been the most indebted to their predecessors 
or to their contemporaries. It has wittily been 
remarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly 
original. Impressionability is one of the condi- 
tions of the creative faculty : the sensitive mind 
is the only mind that invents. What the poet 
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reads, sees, and feels, goes into his blood, and 
becomes an ingredient of his originality. The 
color of his thought instinctively blends itself 
with the color of its affinities. A writer's style, 
if it have distinction, is the outcome of a hun- 
dred styles. 

Though a generous borrower of the ancients, 
Herrick appears to have been exceptionally free 
from the influence of contemporary minds. 
Here and there in his work are traces of his 
beloved Ben Jonson, or fleeting impressions 
of Fletcher, and in one instance a direct in- 
fringement on Suckling; but the sum of 
Herrick's obligations of this sort is inconsider- 
able. 

This indifference to other writers of his time, 
this insularity, was doubtless his loss. The more 
exalted imagination of Vaughan or Marvell or 
Herbert might have taught him a deeper note 
than he sounded in his purely devotional poems. 
Milton, of course, moved in a sphere apart. 
Shakespeare, whose personality still haunted the 

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clubs and taverns which Herrick frequented on 
his first going up to London, failed to lay any 
appreciable spell upon him. That great name, 
moreover, is a jew^el w^hich finds no setting in 
Herrick's rhyme. His general reticence rela- 
tive to brother poets is extremely curious vs^hen 
we reflect on his penchant for addressing four- 
line epics to this or that individual. They were, 
in the main, obscure individuals, whose iden- 
tity is scarcely worth establishing. His London 
life, at two different periods, brought him into 
contact with many of the celebrities of the day ; 
but his verse has helped to confer immortality 
on very few of them. That his verse had the 
secret of conferring immortality was one of his 
unshaken convictions. Shakespeare had not a 
finer confidence when he wrote, 

Not marble nor the gilded monuments 

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, 

than has Herrick whenever he speaks of his own 

poetiy, and he is not by any means backward in 

speaking of it. It was the breath of his nostrils. 

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Without his Muse those nineteen years in that 
dull, secluded Devonshire village w^ould have 
been unendurable. 

His poetry has the value and the defect of that 
seclusion. In spite, however, of his contracted 
horizon there is great variety in Herrick's themes. 
Their scope cannot be stated so happily as he has 
stated it : 

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers, 

Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers ; 

I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, 

Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes; 

I write of Youth, of Love, and have access 

By these to sing of cleanly wantonness; 

I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece 

Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris ; 

I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write 

How roses first came red and lilies white; 

I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing 

The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King; 

I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) 

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. 

Never w^as there so pretty a table of contents ! 
When you open his book the breath of the Eng- 
lish rural year fans your cheek ; the pages seem 

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to exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if 
sprigs of tansy and lavender had been shut up 
in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense 
of havsrthorn hedges and v^ide-spreading oaks, 
of open lead-set lattices half hidden with honey- 
suckle ; and distant voices of the haymakers, re- 
turning home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily 
on one's ear, as sounds should fall when fancy 
listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly 
English as Herrick. He painted the country 
life of his own time as no other has painted it at 
any time. 

It is to be remarked that the majority of Eng- 
lish poets regarded as national have sought their 
chief inspiration in almost every land and period 
excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy, 
Denmark, Greece, Egypt, and to many a hitherto 
unfooted region of the imagination, for plot and 
character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but 
the Garden of Eden and the celestial spaces, that 
lured Milton. It is the Ode on a Grecian Urn, 
The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment 
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of Hyperion that have given Keats his spacious 
niche in the gallery of England's poets. Shelley's 
two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The 
Cenci, belong respectively to Greece and Italy. 
Browning's The Ring and the Book is Italian ; 
Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the 
Idylls of the King, and Matthew Arnold's Soh- 
rab and Rustum — a narrative poem second in 
dignity to none produced in the nineteenth cen- 
tury — is a Persian story. But Herrick's " golden 
apples" sprang from the soil in his own day, 
and reddened in the mist and sunshine of his 
native island. 

Even the fairy poems, which must be classed 
by themselves, are not wanting in local flavor. 
Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurable dis- 
tance from that of " A Midsummer Night's 
Dream." Puck and Titania are of finer breath 
than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to 
have Devonshire manners and to live in a minia- 
ture England of their own. Like the magician 
who summons them from nowhere, they are 
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fond of color and perfume and substantial feasts, 
and indulge in heavy draughts — from the cups 
of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they in- 
habit everything is marvelously adapted to their 
requirement ; nothing is out of proportion or out 
of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious 
people in their winsome way, " part pagan, part 
papistical ; " they have their pardons and indul- 
gences, their psalters and chapels, and 

An apple's-core is hung up dried, 
With rattling kernels, which is rung 
To call to Morn and Even-song; 

and very conveniently, 

Hard by, i' th' shell of half a nut, 
The Holy-water there is put. 

It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin- 
world, where the impossible does not strike one 
as incongruous, and the England of 1648 seems 
never very far away. 

It is only among the apparently umpremedi- 
tated lyrical flights of the Elizabethan dramatists 
that one meets with anything like the lilt and 
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liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no de- 
gree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia 
and dirges of his that might properly have fallen 
from the lips of Posthumus in " Cymbeline." 
This delicate epicede would have fitted Imogen : 

Here a solemne fast we keepe 
While all beauty lyes asleepe ; 
Husht be all things ; no noyse here 
But the toning of a teare, 
Or a sigh of such as bring 
Cowslips for her covering. 

Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in 
essence; the Mad Maid's Song, for example. 
The lyrist may speak in character, like the 
dramatist. A poet's lyrics may be, as most of 
Browning's are, just so many dramatis per- 
sonce. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage- 
direction in a seventeenth-century play whose 
name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized in 
a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. 
In one of his couplets Herrick neatly denies that 
his more mercurial utterances are intended pre- 
sentations of himself : 

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To his Book's end this last line he'd have placed — 
Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste. 

In point of fact he was a whole group of im- 
aginary lovers in one. Silvia, Anthea, Electra, 
Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those lively 
ladies ending in «, were doubtless, for the most 
part, but airy phantoms dancing — as they should 
not have danced — through the brain of a senti- 
mental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar 
of the Church of England. Even with his over- 
plus of heart it would have been quite impossible 
for him to have had enough to go round had 
there been so numerous actual demands upon it. 
Thus much may be conceded to Herrick's 
verse : at its best it has wings that carry it nearly 
as close to heaven's gate as any of Shakespeare's 
lark-like interludes. The brevity of the poems 
and their uniform smoothness sometimes produce 
the effect of monotony. The crowded richness 
of the line advises a desultory reading. But one 
must go back to them again and again. They 
bewitch the memory, having once caught it, 
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and insist on saying themselves over and over. 
Among the poets of England the author of the 
'' Hesperides " remains, and is likely to remain, 
unique. As Shakespeare stands alone in his vast 
domain, so Herrick stands alone in his scanty 
plot of ground. 

Shine, Poet ! in thy place, and be content. 



195 



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Cambridge y Mass.^ U.S.A. 



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